Imagine a scam where you’re paid more for stalling, overspending, and underdelivering. That’s NASA’s cost-plus contracts, the rotten core of the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion capsule, and Lunar Gateway. These deals, guaranteeing contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin profits no matter how epically they flop, are a taxpayer-funded crime scene. The real enemy? Corporate CEOs and politicians, fattened on this bottomless trough of waste, raking in millions while NASA’s programs are kept on life support, eternally late and eternally over budget. The White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget is hacking these boondoggles to pieces: it’s a Johnny Cash size middle finger to their hustle. This isn’t just about saving cash—it’s about torching a fraudulent system that’s gifting China the Moon while US taxpayers bankroll bureaucratic bloat.
Cost-plus contracts are legalized larceny. Legal, but nonetheless, government waste. Unlike fixed-price deals that demand results, cost-plus covers every cost—however ludicrous—plus a fat profit. Delay the project? Ka-ching. Bust the budget? Get even more millions. The SLS, a $50 billion rocket that’s limped to one uncrewed flight in 14 years, is the shining star of this swindle. Its $4.1 billion Artemis I launch in 2022 left Orion’s heat shield flaking like a bad manicure, yet Boeing’s CEO still pockets eight-figure bonuses. Politicians, meanwhile, steer SLS funds to their districts—Alabama, Florida, Texas—keeping their campaign war chests stuffed. The budget’s move to axe SLS and Orion after Artemis III, saving $879 million a year, is a stake through this bloodsucker’s heart.
NASA’s Artemis program, a $93 billion money pit, is another cost-plus catastrophe. First pitched as capable of making a lunar landing by 2024, has slipped to 2028 and probable longer, costs exploding 140% over projections. Why? Cost-plus contracts breed a bureaucracy that lives for delays. Contractors and NASA lifers don’t want Artemis to succeed—completion would kill their golden goose. Picture Artemis actually landing on the Moon. What then? Kill the program like its brother Apollo? CEOs and politicians might not be able to make their yacht payments or their third mortgage. Efficiency? It’s their nightmare. The budget’s $6 billion slash to NASA’s $24.8 billion purse screams: no more rewarding sloth!
The Lunar Gateway, a $3 billion orbiting vanity project, is cost-plus incarnate. Once a pitstop for Orion, it’s now pointless. Yet companies milk delays for profit, while politicians hype “international cooperation” to justify the tab. If Gateway were canned tomorrow, what would happen? The gravy train would crash, leaving CEOs bonus-less and senators without slush funds. The budget’s termination of this boondoggle tells Canada, Europe, and the UAE to innovate or buzz off. Tough love, but necessary.
The ISS, a 25-year-old orbiting relic, hemorrhages billions via cost-plus maintenance deals. The budget’s $500 million cut, shrinking crew and research, faces facts: it’s obsolete. Private stations being development like Axiom’s, Orbital Reef (Blue Origin), Starlab (Voyager/Nanoracks), and Haven-1 (Vast) can do better for less, but cost-plus loyalists cling to 2030 retirement. If the ISS were swapped for an efficient alternative, contractors’ cash would vanish, and politicians couldn’t posture about “leadership.” The threat of efficiency robs their wallets and haunts their dreams.
Let’s talk STEM programs, rebranded as “woke STEM engagement” in the budget’s brutal takedown. The $143 million in cuts gut these feel-good schemes that siphon money to connected nonprofits while barely denting the aerospace workforce gap. Want to inspire kids? Skip the overpriced NASA camps and show them a SpaceX dual Falcon9 booster landing on YouTube or how about a field trip, remember those? Go to South Padre Texas and watch a 17 million thrust producing rocket shake the Port of Brownsville on liftoff and eight minutes later the 33-engine booster returns to launch site and trumpets an enormous sonic-boom as it is caught by Mechzilla! It’s the most visceral thing I have ever experienced. SpaceX and Blue Origin are already swamped with applicants, proving the private sector’s outshining government’s middleman act. Rocket boosters autonomously landing? That game-changer, born from Elon Musk’s lean, results-driven model, had STEM students worldwide geeking out, dreaming of engineering the next big thing. NASA’s cost-plus bloat, meanwhile, was churning out delays and safety PowerPoint presentation. SpaceX’s innovation, built on fixed-price accountability, is inspiring a new generation to rethink rocketry.
While NASA’s cost-plus circus stuffs CEOs’ and politicians’ pockets, China’s space program laps us. Their Tiangong station was built in two years for a fraction of the ISS’s cost. Their 2030 lunar landing plan mocks Artemis’s dawdling. China skips cost-plus leeches—they set goals and nail them. If our US government run programs ever succeeded, if they ever cured cancer or “landed a moon on the moon by the end of the decade…” it would be the end. The cost-plus empire would implode. No more untraceable billions vanishing into contractors’ accounts or politicians’ deep pockets. If cost-plus contracts evaporated, the obscene piles of cash—too vast to track—would stop flowing to the elite. That’s why they’re sweating these cuts. Defenders—corporate kingpins and their congressional lackeys—sob that the budget “cedes space to China.” Garbage. The real threat is the cost-plus system kneecapping our edge. China wins because they don’t pay contractors to keep comatose programs on life support. The new budget’s proposal of $7 billion for lunar exploration and $1 billion for Mars programs keep us in the fight, but smarter. SpaceX’s Starship, built on fixed-price contracts for a tenth of SLS’s cost, is the future.
What happened to NASA? Once the Wild West of space, it was a realm where astrophysicists and astronauts, brimming with swagger, defied safety, scoffed at limits, and believed America could anything. Now? NASA’s a bloated bureaucracy, shackled by cost-plus contracts and risk-averse paper-pushers who’d rather fund decades of delays than deliver a human to Mars. The new space cowboys: private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace and Axiom, who defy lethargy, spit out their Ritalin and dare to build ship to go where no human has gone before!
Finally, Would Columbus have discovered America if today’s NASA funded his ship? Hell no—he’d still be stuck in a Spanish port, waiting for a $93 billion environmental review and a cost-plus contract to be completed for the overdue sails for the Santa Maria. The frontier is open again, but it’s private pioneers, not NASA, who will be planting the flags.
