With Artemis II indefinitely delayed and SpaceX finding favor in the upcoming political climate the future of the RS-25 engines and Aerojet Rocketdyne may be in peril.
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Isn't Aeroject also in the hypersonic business? I don't think SpaceX has a horse in that race, at least not yet.
DOGE will make that decision 😉
SpaceX favor has nothing to do with the current political climate, they do it cheaper and more effectively, Anduril is another one. The future of defense spending isn't bloat and cost plus/t&m garbage. It is a fact that they do it cheaper, faster and more effectively. And they do it without bloated management structures. They hire the best and don't care about demographics of people they hire, sounds about right to me.
The writing is on the wall:
Isaacman, an evangelist for the commercial space industry, has criticized some of NASA's decisions on the Artemis program. In several posts on X, he questioned the agency's decision to fund two redundant lunar landers, while not planning for any backup to the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which costs $2.2 billion per copy, not including expenses for ground infrastructure or the Orion spacecraft itself.
The SLS is fully expendable, meaning none of its parts are reused, despite using solid rocket boosters and main engines that were previously reused on NASA's space shuttle program.
"Spend billions on lunar lander redundancy that you don’t have with SLS at the expense of dozens of scientific programs. I don’t like it," Isaacman wrote on X in March. "I will try to help, but this is why I get frustrated at two lunar lander contracts, when we will be lucky to get to the [Moon] a few times in the next decade. People falsely assume it's because I want SpaceX to win it all, but budgets are not unlimited & unfortunate casualties happen," he wrote in a separate post.
One of those casualties might be the SLS rocket. The program is managed by NASA, with suppliers spread across the United States and prime contractors working under cost-plus arrangements with the space agency, meaning the government is on the hook to pay for any delays or cost overruns.
AJRD makes more than the engines for Artemis, and the quantity of the Artmis engines is dwarfed by the other rocket and missile motors they make.
nobody can compete with spacex, definitely not these honks