Musk threatened to decommission Dragon spacecraft. What that would mean for NASA

Yahoo

a day ago

Amid an escalating feud between billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, Musk threatened to decommission the Dragon spacecraft.
Dragon is a family of spacecraft that is produced by Musk's technology company SpaceX. Various Dragon spacecraft have been making trips to the International Space Station (ISS) since 2012, carrying both cargo and crew to the floating station.
SpaceX is a key partner in NASA's Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent base on the moon and eventually send humans on missions to Mars.
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Although Musk backed off from his initial threat hours later in a post on X, it is possible the world's richest man could change his mind again.
Space science experts told ABC News that SpaceX has been essential to NASA's missions and the breakdown of a relationship would leave a hole that would be hard to fill.
"Basically, the United States has uniquely put all of its eggs into the Elon Musk basket in terms of a sovereign, uniquely American vehicle to get people into and out of space," Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, told ABC News."Now that relationship's severed; it leaves the United States completely vulnerable."
NASA and SpaceX's relationship began in 2008 when the federal space agency launched the Commercial Resupply Services program to deliver of cargo and supplies to the ISS on commercially operated spacecraft.
The agency signed a contract with SpaceX, and awarded the company 12 flights valued at about $1.6 billion.
Mark Jernigan, executive director of the Rice Space Institute in Houston and former associate director for Space Life Sciences Spacecraft Systems Development Support at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, said he was involved in the launching of NASA's commercial cargo program.
"The idea was to offload NASA responsibility by actually changing the paradigm of how NASA did business, and commercial cargo was kind of one of the groundbreaking versions," he told ABC News. "The nature of that was to specify what kind of cargo you wanted to launch, and how much you wanted … and the requirements that the rocket has to meet in order to safely dock with the station."
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At the time, Jernigan said space programs in Japan, Europe, the U.S. and Russia delivered cargo, but now just the latter two do so.
Dragon 1 provided cargo service to the ISS for 10 years, between 2012 and 2020, before it was retired. SpaceX launched Dragon 2 with two versions: one as a replacement for the Dragon 1 spacecraft and the second as a capsule that could take crew into space.
In September 2014, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX and its Crew Dragon spacecraft as one of the companies to transport U.S. astronauts to the ISS.
Michael Liemohn, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, said SpaceX has been essential to NASA's commercial cargo program.
"[SpaceX has been] very important," he told ABC News. "When we retired the space shuttles, our only way [for] sending humans into low Earth orbit was to contract with Russia on a Soyuz capsule, and that's why NASA commissioned both Boeing and SpaceX to build new crew capsules so that there would be capability there."
Jernigan -- the Rice Space Institute executive director -- noted that SpaceX has been more successful than other candidates including Boeing and its spacecraft Starliner.
In June 2024, two NASA astronauts performed the first astronaut-crewed flight of Starliner capsule to the ISS. What was supposed to be a mission lasting about one week turned into a nine-month stay aboard the ISS due to several issues with Starliner and NASA's decision to add the two astronauts to the ISS crew.
Eventually, in March 2025, SpaceX's Crew-10 successfully docked at the ISS, bringing four new astronauts to work on the floating lab and setting up the return to Earth of the two astronauts, as well as a third NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut.
"Right now, the only U.S. provider [for crew] is SpaceX, and so not having SpaceX would be a big deal," Jernigan said. "My speculation would be that if the SpaceX Dragon went away, it would be difficult to ramp up Boeing to replace SpaceX."
He noted that such a change would be costly.
"So if we had to do without SpaceX, we would really have to shift gears and infuse a lot of capital to try to get back our alternatives up to speed," he said.
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SpaceX also plays a role in the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years and eventually set up a permanent base there before heading to Mars.
SpaceX is the lunar lander provider for the first flight and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is the second lunar lander provider.
If Musk were to decommission the Dragon spacecraft and no longer have contracts with NASA, it would be hard for Blue Origin to get up to speed, according to Jah from the University of Texas at Austin
"If Dragon goes away and then it's just Blue Origin, we would have to put more funding resources not just into trying to get Blue Origin to launch sooner, but also in being able to test all those technologies in ways that they haven't been tested yet," he said. "Like, so far, the SpaceX technologies have been very successful in getting people into and out of space. That has not happened yet with the Blue Origin technologies and, at most, they've only had sub-orbital flights."