SpaceX's giant rocket may leave NASA in the dust

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Later today, SpaceX is planning the most ambitious test yet of its massive new rocket Starship. If all goes well, it will lift off from a pad in South Texas, circle the Earth and then land vertically at the same pad 22 and a half hours later.

The test would be a major milestone for a rocket that company founder Elon Musk says he hopes will one day carry astronauts to Mars. But experts say the rapid development of Starship could also end up stranding one of the company's biggest boosters over the years: NASA.

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That's because as SpaceX ramps up its new rocket, it has said it will stop flying a much smaller one called Falcon 9. Falcon 9 launches the company's Dragon capsule, which is currently the only American spacecraft capable of ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

"Because Dragon has become such a successful and reliable vehicle, it became the de facto way for astronauts to get to orbit," said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a firm that tracks the space industry.

According to a NASA announcement in September, the space agency has contracted with SpaceX for three additional flights to the International Space Station. That would only allow Dragon to fly through 2028, assuming the missions were flown consecutively in six month increments and no further flights are contracted with SpaceX.

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The space station is currently set to retire in 2030.

"I love you guys"

The current problem facing the space agency marks a stark reversal from earlier times, when it was SpaceX that was depending heavily on NASA. In 2008, following multiple failures of the Falcon 9, the space launch company was on the ropes.

"We were running on fumes at that point, we had virtually no money," Elon Musk told CBS' 60 Minutes in a 2014 interview.

Then, just days before Christmas, NASA came through with a big contract.

"I couldn't even hold the phone, I just blurted out, 'I love you guys!'," Musk said.

For the next decade, a steady diet of NASA and eventually Pentagon contracts were responsible for a big share of the company's revenue. But all that changed in 2020, when SpaceX launched a subscription satellite internet service called Starlink. Starlink subscriptions quickly eclipsed the money made from launching rockets.

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Today, according to SpaceX's latest financial report, the company made around $2.1 billion in revenue from space launches through September of this year. By contrast, Starlink pulled in around $12.8 billion, while its rapidly growing AI business made around $10.9 billion.

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Winding down Falcon

Starship is central to SpaceX's newer, larger businesses. The space launch company is already using it to send its new, powerful V3 satellites for Starlink into orbit. Further down the road, Musk has said he wants the rocket to deliver data centers to space.

"Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon," Musk said on X earlier this year.

"We definitely want to move from the older technology to the newer technology," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at the All In summit in Los Angeles in September. "A Falcon 9 with a Dragon capsule on top is like a minivan. … The road trip to Mars is six months — so you don't want to be in the minivan."

The problem is that the minivan is perfect for taking astronauts on a short jaunt to the space station. In fact, it's currently the only American option for making the trip.

Henry said building space capsules is time-consuming and expensive. And as it turns out NASA is about the only one willing to pay, making it a very small market for a company like the one SpaceX has become.

"Today there is not a strong commercial market for human spaceflight," he said.

Launch gap

The retirement of the Falcon rocket will have huge impacts beyond human spaceflight. A recent analysis by Quilty Space finds that the commercial market may end up short by some 150 launches between now and 2030, and the Pentagon has reportedly been left scrambling to find rides for national security satellites. In a statement to NPR, the U.S. Space Force said it had secured Falcon 9 launches through 2028 and that it was "confident" other suppliers would be able to pick up the slack.

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None of that is likely to change SpaceX's mind, according to Tim Farrar, the president of TMF associates, a telecom analysis firm that tracks SpaceX.

The company has grown far beyond its launch business, he said. "SpaceX has now got an enormous amount on its plate."

In particular, "it's not making a lot of money out of NASA," he said. "Although it seems likely that the individual missions are profitable, they're small potatoes."

It's still not clear when SpaceX will retire the Falcon 9 rocket. The company did not respond to NPR's request for comment, but in her public comments at the summit, Shotwell implied that a rival company, Boeing, could fly to the station instead.

"Boeing has been paid, I think, probably more than we have been paid to develop their human capsule. So we're just going to let them have some business," she said. "They should fly their capsule."

The Boeing capsule, known as the Starliner, has been beset by problems throughout its development. In 2024, failures with the vehicle's first attempt to take astronauts to space resulted in a planned eight-day mission aboard the ISS becoming a nine-month stay. The astronauts returned home on a SpaceX vehicle in March of the following year. The next Starliner test flight is set to take place over the winter, with a crewed flight sometime in 2028.

For Farrar, SpaceX's choices make sense for its business, but he wonders whether NASA deserves better. "They were responsible essentially for SpaceX not going bankrupt," he said. "One would hope that there's a bit of loyalty."