Tesla & SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump’s romance has taken a historic and unanticipated turn. Elon’s 130-day term as a special government employee ended on May 31st — the events following this are a new chapter in Musk’s life.
Yesterday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he intends to cancel Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s multi-billion-dollar government contracts to support the US economy. He also expressed his surprise that Joe Biden’s administration didn’t cancel them already. His official post read as:
The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!
Source: Truth Social
As soon as President Trump’s official announcement hit the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk couldn’t resist but responded to the statement.
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” he wrote on X.
However, the world was surprised when Elon Musk responded to a fan account with only ~4k followers. This account named “Alaska” advised Musk to “Cool off and take a step back for a couple days”. To which Musk responded, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon”.
Elon Musk’s surprising response to Donald Trump’s statements drew a huge amount of attention on the social media sphere and in the press.
However, as of this writing, Elon Musk’s X posts have been deleted. Musk most probably did this in the best interest of the United States, NASA, and SpaceX.
Looks like Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative has finally hit him back. DOGE aims at minimizing government speding to support the economy. Cutting non-essential spending will ultimately result in a lesser burden on the US taxpayer.
However, in Musk’s vision, the US space program is essential and absolutely necessary to keep the country’s edge in space and related technologies, as China and other countries are gaining momentum in the field.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was the first spacecraft that ended the reign of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft after more than a decade. For human spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS), the United States was using the more expensive Russian space vehicle before Dragon.
The cost of payload and human travel to the ISS has been significantly decreased due to the use of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for ISS missions. As of today, Dragon spacecrafts have made 46 successful missions to the ISS.
Decommissioning the Dragon space vehicle would impact the entire US space program and its cost of operations. SpaceX has become an indispensable for the US space program and Dragon is a crucial part of it.
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