SpaceX's Starship Test Puts NASA's Dragon Flights in a Tighter Spot

SpaceX planned its most ambitious test yet of Starship for Friday: a liftoff from South Texas, a trip around the Earth, and a vertical landing at the same pad 22 and a half hours later, NPR reported.

The flight would be a major milestone for a rocket that company founder Elon Musk says he hopes will one day carry astronauts to Mars. Experts told NPR it could also leave one of SpaceX's most important customers, NASA, in a tighter spot. As SpaceX ramps up Starship, it has said it will stop flying a much smaller rocket, Falcon 9, which launches the Dragon capsule. Dragon 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 contract that only covers Dragon through 2028

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, NPR reported. The station is currently set to retire in 2030.

The bind is a reversal from earlier years, when SpaceX depended heavily on NASA. In 2008, after multiple Falcon 9 failures, the company was "running on fumes" and had "virtually no money," Musk told CBS's 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.

NASA and later Pentagon contracts were a large share of the company's revenue for the next decade. That changed in 2020, when SpaceX launched Starlink. 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. Starlink pulled in around $12.8 billion, while its rapidly growing AI business made around $10.9 billion, NPR reported.

Winding down the 'minivan'

Starship is already being used to send new, more powerful V3 Starlink satellites 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, NPR noted, is that the minivan is perfect for short trips to the space station, and it is still the only American option for making that trip.

Henry said building space capsules is time-consuming and expensive, and NASA is about the only customer willing to pay. A recent Quilty Space analysis 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.

It is still not clear when SpaceX will retire Falcon 9. The company did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, told NPR that SpaceX is no longer defined by its launch business and that NASA missions, even if profitable individually, are "small potatoes" next to Starlink and the company's newer work. For NASA, the question is whether three more Dragon flights will be enough to cover the gap until the station is retired — or until something besides the minivan is ready to fly people there.