Prediction: NASA's Big Moon Mission Hiccup Will Cost Boeing Another $4 Billion in 2025

In This Article:

File today's space story under the lyric, "Second verse, same as the first."

It's been nearly six years now since President Trump (v1.0) announced plans to land Americans on the moon in 2024 under "Project Artemis." Delays and cost overruns in the development of Boeing's (NYSE: BA) Space Launch System (SLS), combined with concerns over the safety of the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)-built Orion space capsule SLS is supposed to carry, have already pushed that deadline back to 2026 -- halfway through the administration of President Trump (v2.0).

And now we know that NASA will miss that deadline, too.

An-ti-ci-pa-tion, NASA's making us wait

In 2022, if you recall, NASA successfully launched its Artemis I mission, the first step in America's return to the moon. On this mission, an SLS space rocket launched an uncrewed Orion space capsule on a path out past the moon and then back to Earth, where the capsule successfully reentered the atmosphere and landed in the ocean.

After landing, however, NASA became concerned about the charring and unexpected breakdown of some of the Avcoat heat shielding that protects Orion from the heat of reentry and pushed back its timeline for launching Artemis II (a crewed mission that will visit lunar orbit, but not land). NASA spent the last two years considering the issue and has finally made its decision: The Orion capsule is good to go, but Artemis II will not launch until 2026, and Artemis III, the mission that will finally land astronauts on the moon, will be pushed back into 2027.

Delays build on delays

Delaying Artemis II's launch date will add seven months to the timeline as the September 2025 launch date becomes an April 2026 launch date instead. Artemis III's delay will be even longer as its September 2026 target morphs into a launch in mid-2027 -- a delay of approximately nine months.

Importantly for investors, the delay will also push any revenues that Boeing and its space partners, which include not just Lockheed but Northrop Grumman, L3Harris -- basically, everybody who's anybody in space -- were hoping to receive from Project Artemis in 2025, into 2026, and any 2026 revenue into 2027.

Artist's depiction of an SLS rocket launch.
Image source: Getty Images.

What this means for Boeing stock in 2025

So, how much money are we talking about? In a recent op-ed, billionaire Michael Bloomberg estimated that each time SLS launches on an Artemis mission, it costs U.S. taxpayers about $4 billion. (My own calculations put the cost closer to $4.1 billion, which, over the course of 20 anticipated SLS launches, makes Project Artemis an $82 billion cash cow for Boeing).