The End of NASA Exceptionalism: Why Relying on Commercial Partners for Deep Space Ambitions Is a Strategic Gamble the U.S. Cannot Afford to Lose

Key Takeaways

• SLS development cost $23.8 billion; per-launch costs hit $4.1 billion versus ~$90M for Falcon Heavy
• Artemis III no longer includes a crewed lunar landing; that milestone has slipped to Artemis IV in 2028
• The Trump FY2026 budget proposed eliminating SLS and Orion after Artemis III, a move Congress rejected

A Mission Delayed Again

On February 27, 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at a press conference and confirmed what many inside and outside the agency had been expecting: Artemis III, long planned as the mission that would return American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, would no longer be a crewed lunar landing. The mission, now targeted for mid-2027, was revised to test rendezvous and docking procedures in low Earth orbit with one or both of the commercial landers under development. The first actual crewed landing was pushed to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.

The announcement followed a cascade of delays that had become the defining characteristic of the Artemis program. Originally aiming for a 2024 crewed lunar landing, Artemis III had slipped to 2025, then 2026, then mid-2027, and now to 2028 for the landing itself. The preceding crewed test flight, Artemis II, launched in April 2026 after being delayed from September 2025 due in part to an unexpected heat shield erosion problem discovered during the uncrewed Artemis I flight in late 2022. The Orion spacecraft’s ablative heat shield had shed material at higher rates than engineering predictions anticipated, and the root cause analysis and the development of a modified flight trajectory that reduced thermal loads on the spacecraft required nearly two years to complete before engineers were confident enough to proceed with a crewed flight.

These delays are not simply the result of technical misfortune, though several specific technical problems, including the Orion heat shield erosion discovered after Artemis I, have contributed real schedule impacts. They reflect structural features of how NASA’s flagship exploration program was designed and how the contractors responsible for delivering it have performed. They also reflect a deepening strategic tension between NASA’s traditional program model, involving government-owned hardware developed through cost-plus contracts with established aerospace primes, and the commercial model that has proven faster and cheaper in low Earth orbit but that has not yet been validated for the significantly harder challenges of deep space operations.

The Cost of Doing It the Old Way

The Space Launch System, the rocket at the center of the Artemis architecture, was originally expected to cost approximately $500 million per launch when development was announced in 2012. The NASA Inspector General’s 2022 audit put the actual figure at $4.1 billion per launch for production costs and ground operations, with that estimate excluding the development costs already spent and the cost of the Orion capsule and its systems. The Inspector General described the cost trajectory as “unsustainable.”

At $4.1 billion per launch, SLS compares unfavorably with every alternative on the market. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which has slightly less lift capacity to the Moon but is already operational, has a stated price around $90 million per launch. SpaceX’s Starship, the vehicle NASA selected under a $2.9 billion Human Landing System contract to ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface, is expected to cost a fraction of SLS per flight once it reaches operational status. Starship’s development has proceeded through six test flights by early 2026, with improving results in each successive flight, but without yet demonstrating the orbital propellant transfer, the depot stacking, and the uncrewed lunar demonstration that the Artemis III mission requires.

The Artemis program had consumed approximately $40 billion in development spending by 2022, according to the Inspector General’s audit, with total projected costs through 2025 approaching $93 billion. Congress appropriated $1.025 billion per year for SLS through fiscal years 2026 to 2029 in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a legislative commitment made specifically to prevent the Trump administration from canceling SLS after Artemis III as its FY2026 budget proposal requested. The FY2026 budget proposal had sought to terminate SLS and Orion following Artemis III and replace them with commercial alternatives for subsequent Artemis missions. Congress rejected this approach, directing that SLS be included in any future competition for Artemis launch services and forbidding NASA from reallocating funds from the Artemis account unless a commercial alternative demonstrably met or exceeded SLS’s capabilities.

Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS core stage, has been a consistent target of criticism in Inspector General audits and congressional hearings. The cost-plus contract structure under which Boeing develops and produces SLS core stages means that development overruns are billed to NASA rather than absorbed by the contractor. “We did see very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part, poor planning and poor execution,” the NASA Inspector General told a House subcommittee in 2022. Boeing’s other major NASA relationship, the Starliner commercial crew capsule, reached its nadir in 2024 when propulsion problems that had been detected before launch but cleared for flight proved more serious in orbit than engineers had assessed, leaving its two-person crew stranded at the International Space Station for approximately nine months before NASA arranged for their return aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The Starliner program has been restructured, with NASA reducing Boeing’s contracted flights from six to three and evaluating a transition to cargo-only operations.

The Commercial Dependency Dilemma

The Artemis architecture’s reliance on SpaceX’s Starship for the Human Landing System reflects a genuine strategic calculation that NASA made in 2021 when it awarded the $2.9 billion HLS contract: that SpaceX’s development pace, technical ambition, and cost profile offered something that traditional government development and traditional government contractors could not. The selection of Starship over the competing proposal from a Blue Origin-led team triggered a legal challenge that Blue Origin lost in November 2021, and NASA subsequently awarded Blue Origin a separate $3.4 billion contract for a competing Human Landing System that would be used on Artemis V and potentially subsequent missions.

The rationale for commercial dependence is sound in theory. SpaceX has demonstrated, through the Commercial Crew Program, that a fixed-price contracting relationship with a capable commercial operator can deliver crew transportation to the International Space Station more cheaply and more reliably than the government-owned approaches that preceded it. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has made multiple successful crewed flights to the ISS, and the total Commercial Crew contract value of $4.9 billion for 14 flights through 2030 compares favorably with what comparable government-developed capabilities would have cost. The Crew Dragon is a demonstrably successful NASA commercial partnership.

Starship is a different proposition. Its scale is extraordinary: it is the most powerful launch vehicle ever flown, designed to carry 100 metric tonnes to low Earth orbit and capable in principle of delivering large cargo payloads to the Moon’s surface directly. But its operational complexity is also extraordinary. To refuel a Starship HLS variant in orbit well enough to reach the lunar surface and return, SpaceX must first launch and park a propellant depot in Earth orbit, conduct at least 14 tanker flights to fill it with cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen, and then launch the HLS itself in a configuration that can receive the propellant and transfer it under microgravity conditions that no mission has ever tested at operational scale. The technical challenge is not merely that Starship itself must work reliably; it’s that an entire on-orbit propellant transfer infrastructure must be developed, demonstrated, and operated before any Artemis astronaut can board it.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said publicly in October 2025 that SpaceX was “behind” on its HLS development schedule and that the administration was considering opening the Artemis lander competition to other providers. Expert analysis at the time suggested that switching lander providers would add years to the schedule rather than accelerating it, because no alternative provider had anything close to flight-ready lunar lander hardware. The warning was largely a negotiating signal, and SpaceX remained on contract.

What “Commercial” Actually Means in Deep Space

The word “commercial” in space policy discussions covers a range of arrangements with different risk profiles, cost structures, and degrees of proven performance. The Commercial Crew Program, which delivers astronauts to and from the ISS using SpaceX Dragon and formerly Boeing Starliner, is straightforwardly commercial in the sense that SpaceX owns and operates the Dragon system, prices its services competitively, and absorbs development cost overruns through its own capital. When SpaceX had problems during Dragon’s development, SpaceX paid to fix them. When Boeing had problems with Starliner, Boeing paid to fix them, at considerable financial cost to Boeing.

The contrast between fixed-price and cost-plus contract incentives is not subtle. SpaceX, operating under fixed-price contracts, had powerful financial reasons to solve development problems efficiently. Boeing, operating under cost-plus relationships on SLS and Orion, had no equivalent financial pressure, which explains in part why a single GovFacts analysis found the entire SpaceX Commercial Crew contract totaled $4.9 billion for 14 crewed ISS missions, while SLS development alone had consumed $23.8 billion by 2025.

The Starship HLS program is different from Dragon in important ways. The $2.9 billion NASA awarded SpaceX covers a specific portion of the development and demonstration costs for a variant of Starship specifically configured for lunar landing. SpaceX is investing additional capital of its own, and the contract is fixed-price in structure, but the program depends on demonstrating capabilities, primarily large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer in orbit, that have no commercial market analog and that SpaceX would not have funded purely on commercial grounds. The Starship HLS arrangement may well be the most cost-effective way to return Americans to the Moon’s surface, but it is being built for a mission that only the U.S. government has funded.

The strategic exposure this creates is specific and worth naming. If SpaceX does not successfully demonstrate orbital propellant transfer and an uncrewed lunar landing before Artemis IV, the United States will not have a Human Landing System available for a crewed lunar mission in 2028. There is no backup at comparable readiness. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, under its $3.4 billion contract, is targeted for Artemis V at the earliest. The entire Artemis IV landing, if it happens on schedule, depends on SpaceX delivering capabilities that have never been operationally demonstrated at any scale, on a timeline set by a geopolitical competition rather than by the engineering readiness of the systems involved.

China’s Timeline and the Race That Isn’t Quite a Race

Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated repeatedly that the Artemis program was in a race against China’s announced 2030 crewed lunar landing timeline. The race framing has been politically useful in securing congressional support for Artemis funding, and it’s not entirely without merit, as there are genuine strategic implications to which country establishes the first sustained presence at the resource-rich lunar south pole.

But the race framing obscures as much as it illuminates. China’s lunar program, operating through the China National Space Administration, has been methodical, consistently funded, and consistently delivered on its stated milestones over a period when the Artemis program missed nearly every one of its own. Chang’e-4 landed on the Moon’s far side at the Von Karman crater in January 2019, the first mission in history to achieve a far-side landing. Chang’e-5 returned 1.73 kilograms of lunar samples to Earth in December 2020, the first sample return from the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first ever from a Chinese mission. Chang’e-6 returned samples from the Moon’s far side in 2024, a mission complexity second only to the Apollo program in lunar surface operations history. China has announced a Chang’e-7 robotic south pole landing in 2026 as a precursor to its crewed landing ambitions, supplemented by Chang’e-8 infrastructure deployment plans for 2028. These are not paper plans; they are a track record of achieved milestones.

The American program, by contrast, has not landed anything on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The Artemis architecture involves a rocket that costs 45 times more per launch than the commercial alternative and depends on a propellant transfer system that has never been demonstrated at scale. The first crewed lunar landing, which was promised for 2024 when the program was formally organized under its current structure, is now expected no earlier than 2028. Whether that timeline reflects an appropriately cautious approach to a legitimately hard engineering challenge or a systemic failure of program management and contractor accountability is a question that reasonable people answer differently.

Lunar Gateway’s Cancellation and What It Reveals

The Lunar Gateway, a planned cislunar space station that was to serve as a staging node for lunar surface operations and a waypoint for deep space missions, was cancelled before 2026 under the Trump administration’s budget priorities, which directed NASA’s exploration funding toward a more direct lunar surface approach. The Trump FY2026 budget request had proposed canceling Gateway along with the SLS Block 1B and Block 2 upgrade programs, and while Congress rejected the SLS termination, the Gateway cancellation moved forward.

Gateway had been developed in partnership with international agencies including the European Space Agency, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency, each of which had committed hardware and personnel resources to the program under the assumption that U.S. commitment to the architecture would be sustained across administrations. Its cancellation raised questions about the durability of those partnerships and about NASA’s ability to maintain the international coalition that the Artemis Accords were intended to anchor. International partners had committed resources and hardware to Gateway on the assumption that it would be a long-term U.S. program commitment. When that commitment was withdrawn, partners had to reassess their relationship with NASA’s lunar architecture.

NASA Administrator Isaacman’s February 2026 announcement also canceled the SLS Block 1B upgrade and standardized on the Block 1 configuration, citing schedule stability. The Block 1B was intended to allow SLS to carry larger payloads, including the Gateway modules that were now cancelled, to the Moon. With Gateway gone and Block 1B cancelled, SLS’s future role in the Artemis architecture beyond the first few missions became less clear.

The Harder Question

The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposal, whatever its political motivations, raised a question that NASA has never satisfactorily answered: if SpaceX can put people into low Earth orbit for roughly $300 million per mission, and if Starship can carry 100 tonnes to the Moon for a fraction of what SLS costs per flight, what is SLS for?

The honest answer is that SLS was designed before the commercial launch revolution reached its current state. It was conceived in 2010 as a government-owned heavy-lift system that would give NASA independent access to cislunar space without dependence on commercial providers that did not yet exist at the scale or reliability that lunar missions required. Its design requirements, many of them driven by the political need to use Space Shuttle-derived components and support the workforce and supply chain established for the Shuttle program, produced a vehicle whose unit economics are incompatible with any sustainable exploration cadence, and whose development costs have consumed funds that could otherwise have supported the commercial transition that NASA simultaneously claims as its strategic direction.

The NASA Inspector General noted that even at bulk production rates, SLS costs more per kilogram to low Earth orbit than any current commercial alternative. The cost disadvantage is not a matter of degree; it is structural. SLS uses expendable core stages built by Boeing at relatively low production rates at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The facility’s workforce and operational tempo are calibrated for the cadence the budget supports, not for the cadence a genuine competitive race with China would require. A program that costs $4.1 billion per launch and produces one rocket per year is not the infrastructure for winning a race against a competitor planning annual lunar landings by the early 2030s.

Congress has continued to fund SLS partly because it protects jobs and industrial capacity in politically important states, particularly Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, and partly because the argument that commercial alternatives are not yet certified for crew transportation to deep space is correct in a specific, if rapidly shrinking, technical sense. But the cost differential between the government approach and the commercial approach has grown wide enough that the sustainability question is no longer theoretical. Spending $4.1 billion to launch a rocket that sends four people around the Moon, in an era when SpaceX is developing a vehicle that could potentially do the same thing for one-tenth the cost, is a policy choice that requires active justification rather than institutional inertia.

The deeper question, which neither the White House’s proposal to cancel SLS nor Congress’s decision to fund it has actually answered, is what NASA’s role should be in deep space exploration once commercial launch costs fall far enough that any adequately capitalized operator could conceivably mount a lunar mission. Apollo’s architecture made sense because only governments could afford it and only government institutions could manage its complexity. The commercial space economy of 2026 is a different environment. A vision of NASA as the world’s preeminent coordinator of a broad international and commercial coalition, defining exploration objectives, safety standards, and scientific priorities while relying on fixed-price commercial operators for the transportation architecture, is one coherent answer that the Commercial Crew Program has partly validated. A vision of NASA as a traditional program manager maintaining government-owned transportation systems as a strategic hedge against commercial single-point failure is another, one that the SLS program’s congressional support coalition has successfully defended through every budget cycle since 2010. The Artemis architecture tries to be both simultaneously, which explains a lot about its cost and schedule history.

Summary

The Artemis program’s serial delays, from a confident 2024 landing target to the revised 2025 goal to the 2026 to 2027 slippage and now to a 2028 target for a mission architecture that has shed its most ambitious element along the way, are symptoms of a structural tension at the center of NASA’s deep space strategy. The government-owned elements of the architecture, SLS and Orion, are technically credible but extraordinarily expensive and dependent on a contractor performance record that the NASA Inspector General has described as poor. The commercial elements, primarily SpaceX’s Starship HLS, offer dramatically lower costs and higher capability but have not yet demonstrated the specific technologies that the crewed lunar landing mission requires.

What this tension produces in practice is a program that is neither cost-competitive with the commercial alternatives nor independent of them. NASA cannot land astronauts on the Moon without Starship, but also cannot abandon SLS without triggering the congressional backlash that has killed or significantly constrained every previous attempt to restructure the program around commercial capabilities. The program moves forward at the pace and cost its political constraints permit, which is slower and more expensive than either the pure commercial model or the pure government model would produce on its own.

The U.S. government is betting its strategic lunar timeline on a commercial partner’s ability to solve hard engineering problems on schedule, while simultaneously maintaining a fallback government-owned architecture that costs too much to sustain at the cadence a genuine competitive race with China would require. That is not exceptionalism; it is an unresolved tension between two incompatible program philosophies that neither the White House nor Congress has yet forced NASA to fully resolve. The Artemis program as it exists in 2026 is the architectural embodiment of that political and institutional stalemate. The Moon is waiting for someone to break it, and China has announced a clear intention to be the one who does so first if American indecision continues past 2030. Whether the stalemate will be resolved by commercial performance that makes the government-owned alternative simply too expensive to defend, by political will that Congress has so far declined to exercise, or by a China milestone that finally forces the urgency the program has been invoking without delivering, is the central open question of American deep space policy in this decade.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is Artemis III and when is the first crewed lunar landing now planned?

Artemis III, revised in February 2026, will no longer be a crewed lunar landing. The mission, now targeted for mid-2027, will instead conduct rendezvous and docking tests with one or both commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit. The first actual crewed lunar landing has been moved to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, marking a delay of more than four years from the program’s original 2024 landing goal.

What does the Space Launch System cost per launch?

According to a 2022 NASA Inspector General audit, SLS’s production cost and ground operations cost approximately $4.1 billion per launch. This figure does not include development costs. NASA’s original 2012 estimate was approximately $500 million per launch, meaning actual costs have grown roughly eightfold. The Inspector General described the trajectory as “unsustainable.”

What is SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System contract?

NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion fixed-price contract in April 2021 to develop a Starship variant called the Human Landing System to carry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface. The mission requires Starship HLS to be refueled in Earth orbit using a propellant depot filled by approximately 14 tanker flights, a technology that has never been operationally demonstrated. Delays in Starship’s development contributed directly to the decision to remove the crewed landing from Artemis III.

What happened to Artemis II and when did it launch?

Artemis II launched in April 2026, carrying four astronauts including NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. The mission was delayed from its original September 2025 target due primarily to an investigation into unexpected heat shield erosion discovered during the uncrewed Artemis I flight in late 2022. Artemis II does not include a landing; it is a crewed test of the SLS and Orion systems.

Why did Congress reject the Trump administration’s proposal to cancel SLS?

The Trump FY2026 budget proposed canceling SLS and Orion following Artemis III and replacing them with commercial alternatives. Congress rejected this approach in the FY2026 appropriations agreement, directing that SLS be included in any future Artemis launch services competition and forbidding NASA from reallocating funds from the program unless a commercial alternative demonstrably met or exceeded SLS’s capabilities. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act separately appropriated $4.1 billion to fund SLS production for Artemis IV and V.

What is Boeing’s role in the Artemis program and how has it performed?

Boeing is the prime contractor for the SLS core stage, building it under a cost-plus contract at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The NASA Inspector General characterized Boeing’s performance on SLS as involving “poor planning and poor execution.” Boeing’s separate commercial crew contract for the Starliner capsule also encountered severe problems, with a 2024 mission leaving two astronauts stranded at the ISS for months before they were returned by a SpaceX Dragon. NASA subsequently reduced Boeing’s Starliner contract from six to three flights.

What was the Lunar Gateway and why was it cancelled?

The Lunar Gateway was a planned cislunar space station developed in partnership with ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency, intended to serve as a staging node for lunar surface operations. It was cancelled under the Trump administration’s FY2026 budget priorities before 2026. International partners including ESA had committed hardware and resources to the Gateway program on the assumption of sustained U.S. commitment. Its cancellation required partner agencies to reassess their participation in the broader Artemis architecture, and raised questions about whether NASA’s commitments to future international space programs carry the continuity that partner agencies need to justify multi-year hardware investments.

How does China’s lunar timeline compare to Artemis?

China has announced plans to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and has a consistent track record of delivering lunar missions, including Chang’e-4 landing on the Moon’s far side in 2019, Chang’e-5 returning samples in 2020, and Chang’e-6 returning far-side samples in 2024. China has announced a robotic south pole precursor mission for 2026. The U.S. first crewed lunar landing is now targeted for 2028 at earliest, giving the U.S. approximately a two-year lead over China’s announced timeline if both programs remain on schedule.

What is the Commercial Crew Program and how does it differ from the Artemis commercial model?

The Commercial Crew Program uses fixed-price contracts with SpaceX and Boeing to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is fully operational and has made multiple successful crewed flights. Under fixed-price contracting, SpaceX absorbed its own development cost overruns. The Starship HLS contract operates similarly in structure but involves significantly more unproven technology, including cryogenic propellant transfer in orbit, than Dragon required. The risk profile is substantially higher even within the same commercial contracting philosophy.

What is the total cost of the Artemis program?

The NASA Inspector General estimated in 2022 that Artemis had consumed approximately $40 billion in development spending to that point, with total projected costs through 2025 approaching $93 billion. SLS development alone consumed $23.8 billion through 2025, representing approximately 26% of the program’s overall budget. These figures exclude the cost of commercial partner investments, international partner contributions, and future mission costs for subsequent Artemis missions.

The ISS Transition and What Comes After

One dimension of NASA’s commercial reliance that has been less controversial is the planned transition from the International Space Station to commercially operated low Earth orbit destinations. The ISS, launched with its first module in 1998 and continuously crewed since November 2000, is scheduled for retirement in the early 2030s. NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program is designed to fund the development of at least one private space station that can serve as the government’s primary LEO research and operational destination after ISS retirement.

Congress allocated $273 million for the CLD program in the FY2026 appropriations agreement, specifically to ensure at least one commercial station is available before the ISS deorbits. Axiom Space, which has been flying private missions to the ISS under NASA contracts, is building commercial modules that attach to the ISS and will eventually separate into an independent Axiom Station. Blue Origin‘s Orbital Reef concept, developed with Sierra Space and a consortium of other partners, represents another element of the commercial LEO ecosystem developing alongside the ISS, targeting a station that could accommodate government research, private research, manufacturing, and tourism within a multi-customer business model that reduces dependence on any single revenue source.

The ISS transition represents NASA’s commercial reliance in its most mature and, by most assessments, least operationally risky form. Commercial LEO stations are a natural evolution of the Commercial Crew model, in which government agencies contract with private operators for services rather than owning and operating the infrastructure themselves. The technical challenges of operating a commercial space station are significant, but they are broadly comparable to the challenges that NASA has already navigated in managing the ISS over 25 years. The stakes of failure are high but not irreversible in the way that a failed lunar landing architecture would be.

The deeper lesson the ISS transition offers is that the commercial model works best when it is demonstrably commercial, meaning the infrastructure has customers and revenue streams that extend beyond government contracts. A commercial station that can host government researchers, private researchers, tourist visitors, pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, and film productions has more financial resilience than one dependent on a single government customer. The Artemis lunar architecture has no equivalent commercial diversification, because no private entity has yet demonstrated sustainable commercial demand for lunar transportation services at the price points that the current Artemis architecture requires to break even, and no regulatory framework or resource extraction regime that might create such demand has yet been established.

Science in the Budget Crossfire

Artemis and the SLS debates dominate the conversation about NASA’s commercial strategy, but the agency’s science programs have faced their own reckoning in the same budget environment. The FY2026 Trump budget proposal called for significant cuts to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate alongside the exploration restructuring. The cancellation of the Gateway reduced the planned lunar science infrastructure. The Mars Sample Return mission, which had been planned as a joint NASA-ESA robotic undertaking to retrieve samples collected by the Perseverance rover, was restructured under the FY2026 budget to shift sample return to future crewed Mars missions in the 2030s, a decision that pushed the expected timeline back by a decade or more and raised questions about the fate of the samples already cached on Mars.

NASA’s science community has watched the budget battles over SLS with a particular frustration rooted in arithmetic. The $4.1 billion per SLS launch represents, as one comparison, roughly the entire annual budget of NASA’s Astrophysics Division. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has transformed observational astronomy since beginning science operations in 2022 and has produced images of galaxies and exoplanet atmospheres that were previously unobservable by any instrument, cost approximately $10 billion over its entire development lifetime, representing somewhat less than three SLS launches. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which began science operations in 2025 as the most powerful optical sky survey instrument ever built, cost approximately $700 million to construct and will produce ten years of sky survey data of a scope previously impossible to achieve. The unit economics of keeping SLS in operation crowd out the science programs that generate the discoveries that inspire public support for the space agency in the first place.