The spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump over the President’s “big, beautiful bill” reached a public boiling point on Thursday with a flurry of furiously typed social media posts. In one post, the SpaceX CEO threatened to immediately decommission the company’s Dragon spacecraft. With the Boeing Starliner still struggling to be certified to fly, the threat poses a unique dilemma for NASA because the Crew Dragon is the agency’s only means of shuttling astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
It’s no secret that a significant proportion of Musk’s business success came from government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits. Musk received $38 billion from the federal government through these various means since 2003, according to the Washington Post. The President threatened to shut off the money hose, and Musk snapped back with next to no concern for the broader consequences. He posted on X, “In light of the President’s statement about the cancellation of my government contracts, SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.” Musk would reverse his decision after being talked down by a random user.
SpaceX is NASA’s only ride to space
SpaceX is currently a contractor in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative to have private companies ferry crews to the ISS. The space agency hoped to establish operational redundancy by having two companies under contract. However, Boeing Starliner’s fault-plagued test flight means a second option is at least six months away. Musk’s space company has already operated nine missions and the SpaceX Crew-10 mission is currently underway with four crewmembers on the station: NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.
The Crew-10 mission would presumably be completed even if Musk pulls the plug, but personnel from the late July’s scheduled Crew-11 wouldn’t be there to replace them. Crew-10 would be stranded despite having a ride home, much like Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams during the Boeing Crew Test Flight.
NASA’s emergency option isn’t a desirable one; Russia. In the nine-year gap between the Space Shuttle’s final mission in 2011 and the SpaceX Crew-1 flight, America’s space agency relied on Roscosmos to get astronauts to the ISS. NASA would have to cut a deal with Russia’s space program to schedule a Soyuz launch to complete the crew rotation. Like how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine destroyed relations between governments, the conflict cleaved open a pre-existing split between NASA and Roscosmos.
Elon Musk threatened NASA before
This outburst from Elon Musk isn’t new. The banished White House squatter claimed early this year that the Biden administration rejected an offer for SpaceX to conduct a rescue mission to bring Wilmore and Williams home. However, no one at NASA heard of the alleged offer. Musk threatened to deorbit the ISS on X after Andreas Mogensen, a Danish ESA astronaut and a former station commander, blatantly called the offer a lie.
If the mass firing of the federal bureaucracy wasn’t a hint, Elon Musk isn’t the empathetic type. He’s throwing a tantrum that he isn’t getting the presidency he paid $250 million for, and he’s willing to jeopardize the space program and the lives of a few astronauts to get it.
