In row with Trump, SpaceX chief Musk says will end critical US spaceship programme

The feud has raised questions about how far Trump, an often unpredictable force who has politically intervened in past procurement efforts, is willing to go to punish Musk, such as whether the president would prioritise exacting political retaliation at the cost of billions of dollars worth of SpaceX contracts that NASA and the Pentagon view as crucial to maintaining US space power status.

SpaceX has won US$15 billion worth of contracts from NASA as the agency relies on Dragon, puts many of its science payloads and spacecraft on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and helps fund development of SpaceX’s Starship, which is poised to land NASA astronauts on the moon this decade.

At the Pentagon, SpaceX’s rocket launch business is crucial for putting national security satellites in space. SpaceX’s military satellite unit is building a massive spy constellation in orbit for a US intelligence agency.

Taking Dragon out of service would likely disrupt the ISS programme, which involves dozens of countries under a two-decades-old international agreement, but it was unclear how quickly such a decommissioning would occur.

Musk has been looking to retire Dragon for years in order to prioritise Starship as the company’s flagship human spaceflight vessel. In 2022, SpaceX opted to halt Dragon production, capping its fleet at four before NASA urged the company to build more as Boeing’s Starliner capsule struggles in development.

NASA had hoped to certify the Starliner for crewed missions, but that programme has faced severe delays.

Its most recent test flight last year ended in failure after the spacecraft experienced propulsion issues en route to the orbital lab with its first astronaut crew.

The Starliner ultimately returned to Earth empty, while the two astronauts were brought home by SpaceX earlier this year.

Crew Dragon’s certification in 2020 ended nearly a decade of US reliance on Russian Soyuz rockets to transport astronauts following the retirement of the Space Shuttle programme in 2011.

American astronauts still fly aboard Soyuz rockets, while Russian cosmonauts ride on Crew Dragons under a long-standing seat-swap agreement.

In addition to NASA missions, Crew Dragon also flies private missions – most recently Fram2, which carried tourists over the Earth’s poles.

The next scheduled crew launch is Tuesday’s Axiom-4 mission, which will see a Crew Dragon transport astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary to the ISS.