Boeing told its employees working on the NASA Artemis lunar program’s Space Launch System rocket they could be facing layoffs by April.
The move underscores the uncertainty facing the Artemis program under the Trump administration, although no specific modifications to the current Artemis plan have been disclosed.
“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,” the company said in a media statement.
The company, which announced the potential layoffs on Friday, said it was required to give 60-day notices of involuntary layoffs to all impacted employees as part of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
“We are working with our customer and seeking opportunities to redeploy employees across our company to minimize job losses and retain our talented teammates,” the company stated.
Boeing is the prime contractor on the SLS rocket’s core stage, which when combined with solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman provide the rocket with 8.8. million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making it for now the most powerful rocket ever to send something into orbit.
So far the SLS rocket has flown just once, on the uncrewed Artemis I mission in late 2022, that sent the Lockheed Martin-build Orion spacecraft on an orbital mission to the moon.
The second SLS rocket is tapped for Artemis II, which would be the first crewed mission of Orion slated for no later than April 2026, aiming to fly four astronauts around, but not land on the moon.
The core stage for that mission arrived to Kennedy Space Center last summer and is now located within the Vehicle Assembly Building where it will be mated with the solid rocket boosters and potentially fully stacked and ready to roll to Launch Pad 39-B before the end of the year for wet dress rehearsals.
The Artemis III mission would follow during which Orion would rendezvous with a SpaceX Starship while in lunar orbit so astronauts could venture down and return humans to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
That mission for now is slated to come as early as summer 2027.
The Trump administration, though, especially with SpaceX founder Elon Musk pushing for a renewed focus on Mars, may shift the direction of the Artemis program, including the further use of SLS rockets, prompting the potential layoffs from Boeing.
The layoffs would affect the core stage manufacturing at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans as well as Boeing jobs in Florida at Kennedy Space Center.
Details on how many jobs in Florida may be affected were not provided.
Boeing already announced 141 layoffs amid its Florida operations that were part of intentions announced in 2024 to lay off 10% of about 170,000 employees nationwide.
Those included 26 at KSC offices, where its Starliner spacecraft is manufactured, and another 20 in Titusville, the home of Boeing’s Space and Launch Division headquarters.
