SpaceX's Falcon 9 wind-down could strand NASA before 2030

Space Force says it secured Falcon 9 launches through 2028

SpaceX scheduled the Starship test for later on Nov. 13, with the rocket lifting off from South Texas, circling the Earth and landing vertically at the same pad 22 and a half hours later. The flight would mark a major milestone for the vehicle company founder Elon Musk has said he hopes will one day carry astronauts to Mars.

The test lands as SpaceX prepares to wind down the smaller rocket beneath it. Falcon 9 launches the company’s Dragon capsule, currently the only American spacecraft capable of ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the 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.

NASA’s September announcement of three additional SpaceX flights to the station would allow Dragon to fly through 2028, assuming the missions were flown consecutively in six-month increments and no further flights were contracted. The space station is currently set to retire in 2030.

The imbalance marks a reversal from earlier years, when SpaceX depended heavily on NASA. In 2008, after multiple Falcon 9 failures, the company was near collapse. “We were running on fumes at that point, we had virtually no money,” Musk told CBS’ 60 Minutes in a 2014 interview. Days before Christmas that year, NASA signed a large contract. “I couldn’t even hold the phone, I just blurted out, ‘I love you guys!’” Musk said.

For a decade, NASA and later Pentagon contracts supplied a big share of SpaceX’s revenue. That changed in 2020, when SpaceX launched Starlink, a subscription satellite internet service whose subscription revenue quickly eclipsed the money made from launching rockets. SpaceX’s latest financial report shows about $2.1 billion in revenue from space launches through September of this year, about $12.8 billion from Starlink, and about $10.9 billion from its rapidly growing AI business.

Starship is central to SpaceX’s newer, larger businesses. The company is already using it to send new, powerful V3 Starlink satellites into orbit, and 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.

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell made the case for the switch at the All In summit in Los Angeles in September. “We definitely want to move from the older technology to the newer technology,” Shotwell said. “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 minivan, however, is currently the only American option for the trip to the space station. Henry said building space capsules is time-consuming and expensive, and that NASA is about the only customer willing to pay for them. “Today there is not a strong commercial market for human spaceflight,” he said.

The retirement of the Falcon rocket would reach beyond human spaceflight. A recent Quilty Space analysis found 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.

Tim Farrar, president of the telecom analysis firm TMF Associates, which tracks SpaceX, said the wind-down is unlikely to change the company’s mind. SpaceX 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,” Farrar said. “Although it seems likely that the individual missions are profitable, they’re small potatoes.”

It is still not clear when SpaceX will retire the Falcon 9, and the company did not respond to NPR’s request for comment. At the September summit, Shotwell implied that rival 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,” Shotwell said. “They should fly their capsule.”

Boeing’s Starliner capsule has had repeated problems during development: in 2024, failures on its first attempt to take astronauts to space turned a planned eight-day mission aboard the station into 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.

Farrar said SpaceX’s choices make sense for its business, but questioned 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.”