Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, on Thursday said his company SpaceX would begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft after he engaged in an extraordinary public fallout with Donald Trump who had threatened to cancel government contracts with Musk’s businesses.
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk posted on the social media platform X, which he owns.
A few minutes earlier Trump had posted on Truth Social – the media platform that he owns – that he might cancel huge lucrative contracts with Musk’s businesses, which include the SpaceX company that is building a fleet of rockets.
Say goodbye to human spaceflight for an entire generation. We made a huge mistake hitching everything onto this fucker’s stuff.
I’ve been waiting for us to leave LEO since I was a kid in the 80s and it now looks like I might be dying without ever having witnessed even a moon landing. I envy my parents.
Unless China or India or Russia pull something off. They’re all we have after this.
Can’t the admin simply seize SpaceX, if it is that important to “national security”? If elon complains, deport him and nationalize his stuff on the grounds that he got his citizenship under illegal pretenses (illegal immigrant).
They certainly could. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea either - Elon is not stable enough to handle the decision making for national security tech.
I mean, the current national security advisor doesn’t seem stable enough to handle the decision making either. It’s unsurprising that E-Mu fit in fine with this administration until recently.
I find that less likely than an investor and board of directors revolt at SpaceX.
SpaceX is a private company. Musk has total control over it.
They have many private investors.
I think you mean for the west. China has its own rockets and space station and I imagine they aren’t stopping just cause SpaceX decided to shoot itself in the foot.
I think you mean for America. Europe has its own programs and they’re only ramping them up.
Most of Europe is at war with the only European country who’s gotten people into space. Russia certainly doesn’t have the money or capacity to work on manned space operations right now and while the rest of Europe may be working on it, they might get there.
I was talking about ESA. They have the capability with the Arianne 6 to get people into space.
I can’t find anything about crewed flights. The best I found was this article.
This Wiki mentions planned manned flights for Ariane, but maybe they’ve done something recently?
China is already testing a starship clone.
We’ve seen it works. It can be reengineered. Not that they’d be allowed to just ignore their contract like that. They’d forcefully remove the company from him before that happened.
China.
China is killing it honestly. My money is actually on them for next boots on the moon.
Shades of The Martian are coming to mind for me.
Ironic that the man convinced he was going to take humanity to Mars just set back humanity’s interplanetary expansion by a generation.
Maybe what we’ve lost with this mistake will balance out by teaching us that autocrats/oligarchs don’t serve us but it’s hard to imagine it at this point.