Boeing’s capsule is NASA’s fallback but likely costlier, analyst says
SpaceX is preparing to test-launch Starship for Nov. 13, the largest rocket ever built — a giant stainless-steel vehicle whose lift-off roar NPR described as deafening — even as NPR reported, those plans might strand NASA, one of SpaceX’s biggest allies. Elon Musk has said he hopes Starship will one day carry astronauts to Mars. For now, moving people around in space falls to a much smaller SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9, which shuttles astronauts to and from the International Space Station using a capsule called Dragon. Mission audio recorded the Dragon capsule Grace, carrying Crew 13, making contact with the International Space Station at 6:05 p.m. Central time.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell signaled the direction of travel at the All-In Summit in September. “Yeah, we definitely want to move from the older technology to the newer technology,” Shotwell said. She compared the current configuration to a familiar vehicle. “A Falcon 9 with a Dragon capsule on top is like a minivan — road trip in a minivan. The road trip to Mars is six months, so you don’t want to be in the minivan.”
The minivan, however, is perfectly suited to short runs to the space station, and it is currently the only American option for the trip. Caleb Henry, who directs research at Quilty Space, a firm that tracks the space industry, said Dragon’s reliability made it the default way for astronauts to reach orbit. “Because Dragon has been such a successful and reliable vehicle, it became the de facto way for astronauts to get to orbit,” Henry said. He said building space capsules is time-consuming and expensive, and that NASA is about the only customer willing to pay. “Today, there is not a strong commercial market for human space flight,” Henry said.
Starship cannot currently carry NASA astronauts, and crew flights do not appear to be a near-term priority for SpaceX. The company wants to use Starship first to expand its Starlink internet satellite business and for possible data centers in space, and, as NPR reported, satellite internet and data centers are key to growth. In a post earlier this year, Musk wrote that “it makes sense to shift superscarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship.”
Tim Farrar, president of the telecom analysis firm TMF Associates, said the shift reflects a changed business. “SpaceX has now got an enormous amount on its plate,” Farrar said. As the company has grown, its NASA contracts have become far less valuable to it. “It’s not making a lot of money out of NASA,” Farrar said. “Although it seems likely that the individual missions are profitable, they’re small potatoes.”
That dependence ran the other way in the company’s early years. In 2008, NASA funding was widely believed to have saved SpaceX. In a 2014 interview on “60 Minutes,” Musk recounted the moment: “We were running on fumes at that point. We had virtually no money.” Just days before Christmas that year, NASA came through with a big contract. “I couldn’t even hold the phone,” Musk said. “I was like — I just blurted out, I love you guys.” For the next decade, a steady diet of NASA and eventually Pentagon contracts kept the company going, according to Farrar. “I think it’s a shock to a lot of people that NASA would do all this work,” Farrar said. “They were responsible for SpaceX essentially not going bankrupt. One might hope that there’s a bit of loyalty.”
It remains unclear when SpaceX would retire the Falcon 9. The company did not respond to NPR’s request for comment. NASA has a capsule built by Boeing it could eventually use instead, but Henry said it will likely be much more expensive.