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Boeing has fuelled speculation that US President Donald Trump is set to overhaul Artemis by notifying 400 employees working on the program that they could be made redundant.
The troubled aerospace giant, along with Northrop Grumman, is currently tasked with manufacturing the Space Launch System rocket, while SpaceX is using a modified version of Starship to act as a lunar lander.
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However, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has argued the plan is “extremely inefficient” given the company has made significant progress with testing Starship, which it believes can take humans directly to Mars without external help.
It comes after a challenging year for Boeing in both the space and aviation sectors, including mechanical difficulties with its Starliner spacecraft and renewed scrutiny on the safety of its aircraft following the mid-air blowout of a door plug on board an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 last January. The firm recently posted the second-biggest loss in its history.
“To align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations, today we informed our Space Launch Systems team of the potential for approximately 400 fewer positions by April 2025,” Boeing told industry news site SpaceNews.
“This will require 60-day notices of involuntary lay-off be issued to impacted employees in coming weeks, in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.”
NASA has not formally announced any revisions to Artemis but recently delayed the second launch designed to fly astronauts close to the moon from September 2025 to April 2026.
The news means the subsequent Artemis III mission to return humans to the moon will also be pushed back until the middle of 2027.
Boeing also had the indignity of NASA announcing it would use SpaceX to return its astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, following problems with its separate Starliner launch vehicle.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is currently working on the eighth launch of Starship and hopes to conduct as many as 25 test missions each year.
Testing began in April 2023 when the spacecraft failed to reach orbit but culminated in the first stage incredibly returning to the original launch pad and being caught by mechanical arms in October last year.
The last launch, however, ended with the upper stage exploding over the Atlantic Ocean after a fire developed in the ship’s rear.
Australia is now a key player in the subsequent Artemis program, with the US space agency tasking the Australian Space Agency with creating a rover that will collect lunar regolith, or moon soil, that will eventually be turned into oxygen to support a permanent human base.
The news comes after Musk posted on his social media platform X that Artemis was a “jobs-maximising program, not a results-maximising program”.
“Something entirely new is needed,” he wrote.
Trump and Musk appear to be in lockstep as the new president used his inauguration speech to pledge astronauts would “plant the stars and stripes” on Mars.
The returning president said the country would pursue its “manifest destiny into the star” and hailed Americans as being “innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers”.
“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” Trump said. “The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.”
Trump’s decision to include Mars in his speech is hugely significant, given he changed US national policy in 2017 to make human space exploration a priority again.
