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Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s spectacular fallout could have catastrophic consequences for the future of space travel.
The two men – the president and the person who previously referred to himself as the “first buddy” – have in recent hours been engaged in a high-profile fight that has seen them make a host of threats and allegations about each other in public.
Many of those comments relate to their personal character and history. But one of the more substantial moments came when Mr Trump appeared to suggest he could cancel Mr Musk’s government contracts.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” He wrote on his own Truth Social platform.
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Mr Musk’s wrote on his own X platform soon after. (Soon after, he wrote that we “won’t decommission Dragon”, though it was unclear how seriously any of the posts were intended to be taken.)
The argument prompted outcry – and not only for its tone. Mr Musk was warned by Ars Technica journalist Eric Berger in a post that his threat would “both end the International Space Station and simultaneously provide no way to safely deorbit it”, in a tweet that he responded to. The consequences for the US and the world’s plan to explore space could be even more expansive than that.
As Mr Berger’s posts suggested, Mr Musk’s threat to decommission Dragon could put the International Space Station in peril. Currently, it is the only way that the US can safely send astronauts up to space and bring them back down again. Eventually, SpaceX is expected to build the spacecraft that will bring the International Space Station out of orbit and to a fiery and safe end, after its operation life is complete in 2030.
But the consequences could be much wider. Nasa, SpaceX and others have been clear that the eventual plan is to move away from a focus on low-Earth orbit of the kind that ISS embodies, and further on into space. First, that will mean taking astronauts back to the Moon and then eventually, they hope, to Mars.
Those missions will probably depend on SpaceX too. The company has been hard at work on its upcoming Starship, which is being built with the explicit aim of colonising Mars.
Much of SpaceX’s domination over space travel can be traced back to one moment, in the wake of the cancellation of the Space Shuttle programme. The Space Shuttle was intended to be the start of a new journey to reusable spacecraft and relatively simple flights to space, but deadly disasters, high costs and other problems meant that it ended in 2010.
That left the US without the ability to send astronauts to space from its own soil, and for a decade it depended on Russia to do so. In 2020, SpaceX’s Dragon took astronauts to orbit, and it has since become a regular visitor.
Nasa as a result relies heavily on SpaceX’s dragon. Perhaps that reliance was made most clear earlier this year, when Boeing’s Starliner – intended to be a rival to the Dragon – suffered from technical issues on its way to the space station, and its crew had to be brought back on board a SpaceX spacecraft.
If Mr Trump were to make good on his threat to cancel those programmes, or Mr Musk did the same with his suggestion that he could bring the Dragon programme to an end, all of that work would be in peril. With it, the whole plan for US space travel to the ISS, the Moon and onto Mars would be at risk, given how central SpaceX has become to those plans.
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