So when President Donald Trump threatened on Thursday to cancel Elon Musk’s federal contracts, space watchers snapped to attention.
For now, experts say mutual dependence should keep a full-blown rupture at bay, but the episode exposes just how disruptive any break could be.
Driven by Musk’s ambition to make humanity multiplanetary, it is now NASA’s sole means of sending astronauts to the ISS -- a symbol of post-Cold War cooperation and a testbed for deeper space missions.
The company has completed 10 regular crew rotations to the orbiting lab and is contracted for four more, under a deal worth nearly $5 billion.
Were Dragon grounded, the United States would again be forced to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets for ISS access -- as it did between 2011 and 2020, following the Space Shuttle’s retirement and before Crew Dragon entered service.
NASA had hoped Boeing’s Starliner would provide redundancy, but persistent delays -- and a failed crewed test last year -- have kept it grounded. Even Northrop Grumman’s cargo missions now rely on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the workhorse of its rocket fleet.
A lunar lander variant of Starship is slated for Artemis III and IV, the next US crewed Moon missions. If Starship were sidelined, rival Blue Origin could benefit -- but the timeline would almost certainly slip, giving China, which aims to land humans by 2030, a chance to get there first, Forczyk warned.
Still, the feud could sour Trump on space altogether, she added, complicating NASA’s long-term plans.
- Private power, public risk -
“It’s such a doomsday scenario for both parties that it’s hard to envision how US space efforts would fill the gap,“ Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP.
Signs of a rift emerged last weekend, when the White House abruptly withdrew its nomination of e-payments billionaire Jared Isaacman -- a close Musk ally who has twice flown to space with SpaceX -- as NASA administrator.
The broader episode could also reignite debate over Washington’s reliance on commercial partners, particularly when one company holds such a dominant position.
“This is just another data point that might bolster the case for why it can be risky,“ he said. “I think that seed has been planted in a lot of people’s minds -- that it might not be worth the trust.”
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