The feud has raised questions on how far Trump, an typically unpredictable power who has politically intervened in previous procurement efforts, is prepared to go to punish Musk, similar to whether or not the president would prioritise exacting political retaliation at the price of billions of {dollars} value of SpaceX contracts that NASA and the Pentagon view as essential to sustaining US area energy standing.
SpaceX has gained US$15 billion value of contracts from NASA because the company depends on Dragon, places lots of its science payloads and spacecraft on the corporate’s Falcon 9 rocket and helps fund improvement of SpaceX’s Starship, which is poised to land NASA astronauts on the moon this decade.
On the Pentagon, SpaceX’s rocket launch enterprise is essential for placing nationwide safety satellites in area. SpaceX’s army satellite tv for pc unit is constructing a large spy constellation in orbit for a US intelligence company.
Taking Dragon out of service would doubtless disrupt the ISS programme, which entails dozens of nations underneath a two-decades-old worldwide settlement, but it surely was unclear how rapidly such a decommissioning would happen.
Musk has been seeking to retire Dragon for years as a way to prioritise Starship as the corporate’s flagship human spaceflight vessel. In 2022, SpaceX opted to halt Dragon manufacturing, capping its fleet at 4 earlier than NASA urged the corporate to construct extra as Boeing’s Starliner capsule struggles in improvement.
NASA had hoped to certify the Starliner for crewed missions, however that programme has confronted extreme delays.
Its most up-to-date check flight final 12 months led to failure after the spacecraft skilled propulsion points en path to the orbital lab with its first astronaut crew.
The Starliner in the end returned to Earth empty, whereas the 2 astronauts have been introduced dwelling by SpaceX earlier this 12 months.
Crew Dragon’s certification in 2020 ended almost a decade of US reliance on Russian Soyuz rockets to move astronauts following the retirement of the House Shuttle programme in 2011.
American astronauts nonetheless fly aboard Soyuz rockets, whereas Russian cosmonauts trip on Crew Dragons underneath a long-standing seat-swap settlement.
Along with NASA missions, Crew Dragon additionally flies non-public missions – most lately Fram2, which carried vacationers over the Earth’s poles.
The subsequent scheduled crew launch is Tuesday’s Axiom-4 mission, which can see a Crew Dragon transport astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary to the ISS.
