When Scott Pace says it’s time to throw in the towel, the end of SLS isn’t far off. I had lunch with a friend in Santa Monica yesterday who had just gotten off the phone with him, in anticipation of his testimony.

By “off ramp,” I assume he’s saying fly Artemis 2 and 3, but end the program after that. That would mean an immediate cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage, and the ML-2 mobile platform, whose costs were beyond ridiculous, because they were only needed for Artemis 4. As I’ll note in my upcoming study for the Reason Foundation, that in itself would save almost a billion dollars per year. But cancellation of SLS itself will save a couple billion.