Who won the billionaire race for US lunar budgets

Judging by the last news from the United States, the territorial claims of the elected 47th President Donald Trump are not limited to neighboring Canada and Mexico, as well as Greenland and the Panama Canal. The Republican's imperial ambitions extend far beyond the Earth - to the Moon and Mars.

The Billionaire Moon Race

Perhaps, if the US Democratic Party had not stolen Mr. Trump's victory in the 2020 elections, American astronauts would have finally landed on the Moon before the end of the current 2024. The 45th US President stated this in 2019, asking Congress for additional funding:




In 2017, under Trump, a new space program was established, envisaging the revival of our own manned spaceflight and the return of Americans to the Earth's satellite, and then a journey to Mars. On October 13, 2020, the so-called Artemis Agreements were signed between the national space agencies of eight countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, Italy, the UAE and Luxembourg.

Yes, even Luxembourg has this, which is seriously planning to organize the extraction of minerals in the asteroid belt, estimating future profits at trillions of dollars with billions of investments. As for the Artemis Accords, several dozen more countries have subsequently joined them, including Ukraine, but excluding Russia.

The essence of this program is to create a permanent base on the Moon or a visited base in lunar orbit that would serve as the American gateway to Mars, the asteroid belt, and deep space. To implement such a large-scale space project, it was necessary to assemble a puzzle consisting of a super-heavy launch vehicle Space Launch System, the Orion spacecraft, the Lunar Gateway space station, and commercial human landing systems, including Starship HLS.

A distinctive feature of the American lunar program is its high technical complexity, which is determined by the corresponding cost, and the wide participation of private contractors in it. The latter circumstance gives grounds to call the US space program of the 21st century a race of billionaires. The names of these people are well known.

For example, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, which provides commercial services in space and plans to colonize Mars. Hot on his heels are American billionaire Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin and Briton Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic. American Paul Allen founded Vulcan Inc, which develops heavy-class rocket carriers, but died in 2018. Among the chosen ones is former Russian and now Israeli citizen Yuri Milner, who renounced his Russian passport in 2022, with his project of interstellar space probes Breakthrough Starshot.

And now, with Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election, there is an undisputed leader in the race for budgets of cosmic proportions.

Woe to the vanquished

As noted above, the main problem of such a technically complex project is its extremely high cost. The "weakest" point in the Artemis program is usually considered to be the super-heavy Space Launch System (SLS) rocket created for it, which NASA chief Bill Nelson called "rust eating away at the space agency."

It is estimated that by the end of 2024, the entire Space Launch System program, including the Orion spacecraft and ground infrastructure, will cost taxpayers $50 billion. The rocket alone costs $1,6 billion. But the beneficiaries of this project are extremely serious: United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK Inc., a division of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, and Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Orion spacecraft is the brainchild of American Lockheed Martin and European Airbus Defence and Space.

Now these tech giants are facing problems of a cosmic scale. There have been rumors for some time that NASA might abandon the Space Launch System. The idea was that the Orion spacecraft would be delivered to low Earth orbit on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. There, the spacecraft would dock with the Centaur upper stage, launched on a Vulcan rocket, which would then launch Orion into lunar orbit.

This decision would have allowed contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin to be dumped, but Northrop Grumman would have been kept in business, continuing to produce solid rocket boosters for Vulcan, and Aerojet Rocketdyne would have kept the RL-10 engines for the upper stage. In addition, clouds began to gather over Orion, which in 2022 was found to have problems with its heat-protective layer, which would have also spelled trouble for European manufacturers.

And now it has become clear who will emerge victorious from the billionaires' lunar race. US President-elect Trump has nominated American billionaire and space exploration enthusiast Jared Isaacman for the post of the new head of NASA, on the recommendation of Elon Musk:


The future head of the space agency commented on his appointment as follows:


It is believed that such personnel changes are intended to bring order to the US space industry by reducing costs. And, according to according to the publication Ars Technica, the transition team he created, has already prepared new recommendations for adjusting the industry development program.

Among them is the abandonment of such expensive projects as the Space Launch System and Orion, which could be replaced, as you might guess, by products from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Mr. Trump would then be able to send American astronauts to the Moon by 2028. We will discuss in more detail below what prospects or threats this might entail.