SpaceX comes to NASA’s rescue
On Friday, a Boeing Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station to return to Earth without its crew. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore stayed behind due to uncertainty about the safety of the Boeing craft.
The duo will instead hitch a ride back on a SpaceX mission set to arrive at the ISS in February. It’s another win for the Elon Musk-owned company, which has come to dominate rocket launches in the U.S.
But NASA’s reliance on SpaceX now is a bit of a reversal, according to Steven Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict and Governance program. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.
Steven Feldstein: It wasn’t that long ago that SpaceX faced lots of skepticism from NASA and from the the overall industry when it came to whether it would actually be able to be an effective company and come up with rockets in the right types of procedures so that they could be reliable in the future. And so to have this about-face now where all of a sudden, SpaceX is the one that NASA is relying on to salvage a mission that’s gone pretty awry, I think is a really interesting and pretty surprising turn of events.
Meghan McCarty Carino: And what does it kind of say about the current space landscape?
Feldstein: It’s changing very quickly. Boeing, which is the contractor with the Starliner, has been involved in a space program, really, from the very beginning days. And now to see a moment where a relative newcomer has come in and really upended the traditional relationship and done things in a way that’s very different than the norm, I think really speaks to the disruptive moment that NASA and the space program is currently facing.
McCarty Carino: Tell me more about how dominant SpaceX has kind of become in this landscape.
Feldstein: It really has become, at this point, the main alternative when it comes to being able to construct and come up with rockets that will allow the space program to eventually return humans to the moon and to do things beyond. Other than SpaceX, there really isn’t any other competitor in the landscape who is able to play that role, other than what Boeing was attempting to do with its Starliner program.
McCarty Carino: And yet NASA has been kind of reluctant to rely on the company, right?
Feldstein: Well, I think increasingly it has become much more comfortable with that. I think starting about four or five years ago, when SpaceX in 2020 became the first private company to send human crews to space, it really started to show that a lot of the setbacks and failures that it had in the beginning days had been overcome. And so once it was able to sort of demonstrate proof of concept, I think there’s been a much more of a comfort level to say, let’s go with SpaceX, let’s go with an innovative company, and one that’s done things, frankly, very differently than a traditional model of a contract or subcontractor that Boeing represented. So it’s really been interesting to sort of see how innovation and Elon Musk’s vision for the company has really led to something that’s a breakthrough.
McCarty Carino: Boeing has clearly been having a lot of problems in its commercial air part of its business. What do you think this problem with the Boeing Starliner might mean for Boeing’s future with NASA?
Feldstein: It’s an interesting question. I think at least publicly, my understanding is that there is a continued agreement to continue working together. But I think this calls into question a program that already was suffering from over $1 billion worth of setbacks and problems and needed repairs. And I think it does sort of raise the issue: is Boeing’s model, the way it responds to mistakes and problems and setbacks, is that the right one for NASA going forward? Is the right one more broadly for other types of advanced technology? And I think those concerns will not go away anytime in the near future.
McCarty Carino: SpaceX is not the only company that is helmed by Elon Musk that is kind of dominating in its sphere of influence. There’s also Starlink, the satellite internet company. How have governments been working with or not working with Starlink?
Feldstein: Starlink is a really interesting example, and in some ways similar to SpaceX. I think for a long period of time, there was skepticism that low-Earth orbiting satellites and internet satellites would be something that would actually be worth a lot, that would actually provide value. And we’ve seen increasingly, the more Elon Musk has been able to launch Starlink satellites, the more it’s actually shown up to be a very valuable commodity in all kinds of different things, from war to providing internet access to rural areas. And so it’s interesting too, that just like SpaceX faced skepticism, Starlink also faced a lot of criticism, but now it’s proven to be extremely useful, and we’ll see.
McCarty Carino: Elon Musk is obviously a very public figure. He is constantly posting on his social media platform X, sometimes volatile, sometimes things that I think governments might not want to be associated with. How does that risk figure into how governments are thinking about working with companies that he’s associated with?
Feldstein: Yeah, you raise a really good point. The good comes with the bad. On the positive side, we’ve seen some real innovation breakthroughs in multiple different areas, and that can’t be denied. On the other hand, there is an unreliability when it comes to his leadership. He has certainly had been outspoken on a host of issues, including very sensitive national security issues. And there are even questions with Starlink about whether, at key moments during the Ukraine war, he made personal decisions to shut down Starlink’s operational capacity, compromising military missions. So there certainly are a lot of questions when it comes to, is Elon Musk reliable, and is there a security risk depending too much on one company or a multiple number of companies owned by Elon Musk when it comes to things like spaceflight, when it comes to things like national security and fighting war, when it comes to internet, satellite access and so forth? So I think this raises a lot of bigger questions about, is this someone that, ultimately, the United States and other countries can rely upon? And I think the answer is very unclear.
McCarty Carino: What do you think this turn of events means for the commercial space industry, in general? It’s kind of like it’s coming to the rescue of the old guard.
Feldstein: Well, it certainly seems like this places SpaceX in a pole position. I don’t think this isn’t the first moment where Boeing encountered problems with Starliner. It’s something that has been going pretty poorly for five, six-plus years, with many levels of expenses and repairs and so forth. So while this is, I think, a very public, symbolic moment, in some ways, of maybe a transition and reliance on SpaceX, it actually, I think, is the culmination of many prior events.
And in case you were wondering, the astronauts stranded at the International Space Station for the next six months or so have plenty of food and supplies. They don’t have to grow potatoes in human compost like Matt Damon in “The Martian.”
But what they don’t have, according to NASA, is space suits that are compatible with the SpaceX’s Dragon craft. Of course, missions that haven’t left Earth yet can easily pack those along. But should an emergency arise that required evacuating the ISS in the next few weeks, the astronauts would have to board a SpaceX craft that is already docked there without suits.
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