By Joey Roulette
Washington (Reuters) – The fate of around $ 22 billion in SpaceX government contracts is in danger and several American space programs are faced with imminent changes in the benefits of aggravation between the fights between Elon Musk and American president Donald TrumpAn explosive break on the administration’s expenditure invoice.
The disagreement quickly moved away from the fight and chaos on Thursday after Trump destroyed Musk in the comments of the oval office. While Musk has launched a series of missives on X, Trump threatened to terminate government contracts with societies belonging to Musk, who, in response, said that his space company “will immediately start to help his spacecraft dragon”.
The SpaceX Dragon Capsule is the only American spaceship capable of sending astronauts to and from the international space station. NASA has been based on the spacecraft since 2020 as part of a contract with SpaceX worth $ 5 billion, one of the many arrangements of the Musk space company a dominant element of the American space program.
NASA has not immediately returned to request for comments.
The quarrel has raised questions on the path traveled by Trump, an often unpredictable force that has politically intervened in the efforts of past purchases, is willing to punish musk, as the president would favor demanding political reprisals at the price of billions of dollars of spacex spacex contracts.
SpaceX has won a value of $ 15 billion in NASA contracts, because the agency is based on Dragon, puts many of its useful scientific and space charges on the company Falcon 9 rocket and helps finance the development of SpaceX’s Starship, which is ready to land NASA astronauts on the moon.
In Pentagon, the launching activities of SpaceX rockets are crucial to putting national security satellites in space. The SpaceX military satellite unit builds a massive spy constellation in orbit for an American intelligence agency.
Exit Dragon out of service would probably disrupt the ISS program, which implies dozens of countries within the framework of an international agreement of two decades, but it was not clear how much downgrading would occur.
Musk has been looking to withdraw Dragon for years to prioritize the spacecraft as a flagship ship of human space flights. In 2022, SpaceX chose to stop the production of Dragon, caping its fleet at four years before NASA exhorts the company to build more as the Boeing Starliner capsule is struggling with development.
(Report by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; edition by Pooja Desai, David Gregorio and Sandra Maler)
