Elon Musk to the Rescue

When the astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams launched to the International Space Station on June 5, they flew on a Boeing spacecraft and wore the company’s bright-blue spacesuits. On the way home, eight months after their scheduled return, they will likely ride in a SpaceX vehicle, dressed in sleek white suits designed with the aesthetic sensibilities of that company’s CEO and chief engineer in mind. Elon Musk to the rescue.

The two NASA astronauts were supposed to come home after just eight days. Instead, they have been stuck for 81 days on the ISS in a weightless limbo. They were—and still are—fine; the station has plenty of supplies, and work to keep them busy. The question keeping them there has been whether Starliner, the Boeing spacecraft that brought them, was capable of bringing them back. This mission was a test-drive, the first time Starliner had carried people to space, and its thrusters malfunctioned en route to the station. Weeks of tests have not made clear whether the spacecraft can return without the propulsion system sputtering again, which could keep Wilmore and Williams from making it through the atmosphere and back to Earth.

NASA has spent billions of dollars so that it could have two commercial companies, Boeing and SpaceX, transporting astronauts on its behalf. Yesterday, NASA leaders announced that they don’t believe Starliner can bring Wilmore and Williams back safely. SpaceX, Boeing’s competitor, which has been ferrying astronauts to and from the space station for the past four years—no longer a scruffy start-up but a trusted government partner—will bring the astronauts home instead, in February of next year.

NASA hesitated over this decision for weeks, weighing the question of the astronauts’ safety and the best alternative to Boeing—demonstrating just how much America’s space agency has come to depend on SpaceX, and, for better or worse, Musk. Right now, NASA has no other reliable way to send people to space from U.S. soil, and, with Boeing’s flop, no prospect of a second option for potentially years to come.

In many ways, SpaceX is just another aerospace contractor, although right now a very successful one. NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX at the same time to develop spacecraft to carry astronauts to the ISS, a job the U.S. had previously outsourced to Russia. SpaceX completed its own crewed test flight in 2020 and has been doing the job alone ever since. It has been responsible for more launches in recent years than any other provider in the business. When its fleet of rockets was grounded for a couple of weeks this summer after a rare mishap, the missions facing potential launch delays included a cargo run to the ISS, a private astronaut trip, and a science mission to one of Jupiter’s moons. Its newest rocket, Starship, is the backbone of NASA’s plan to return American astronauts to the surface of the moon by the end of this decade; how hard Musk pushes his engineers to make it work will determine exactly when American astronauts touch the lunar surface. The company has become indispensable to the future of the American space program.

SpaceX is also inextricable from Musk, and his ethos fuels the company like rocket propellant. His singular talents drove the firm to pull off incredible feats, landing reusable rockets upright instead of dumping them into the ocean, as was the industry standard. Just a few years ago, these types of accomplishments dominated his public image as a visionary genius who inspired Hollywood’s portrayal of Iron Man. But recently, he’s given his competing persona—a right-leaning troll with an inflammatory public monologue—greater rein. In the past months, he’s prominently cast himself as a MAGA influencer who banters with Donald Trump on the social networking site he’s stripped of safeguards against harassment and misinformation.

Musk has enough influence and power that the U.S. government cannot always ignore his provocations. Last November, the White House accused Musk of promoting “antisemitic and racist hate” on X, for instance. And Musk has occasionally gotten into hot water with NASA; in 2018, his pot-filled appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast riled officials enough to conduct a review of SpaceX’s workplace culture. Nothing came of it, and it’s hard to imagine what Musk would need to do to truly damage SpaceX’s working relationship with NASA. America has become dependent on the richest man on Earth for launch services, internet satellites, and moon landings, for as long as he runs SpaceX. Dissatisfied Twitter users could leave the social network after Musk took it over. But the U.S. government can’t quit SpaceX unless it’s willing to cede its reign as the top spacefaring nation—and, in the case of a botched mission like Starliner, leave its astronauts stranded in orbit.

NASA’s options for bringing Wilmore and Willmore home must have looked grim. Choosing SpaceX meant Boeing had failed, but choosing Boeing, only to have it fail more spectacularly, could have been a more dramatic debacle. Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, told reporters yesterday that the lessons of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, which together killed 14 people, were front of mind. “The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety,” Nelson told reporters.  

Boeing was once NASA’s preferred contractor for the job of bringing astronauts to the ISS, in part because NASA leaders thought that SpaceX’s lower bid for the job was unrealistic, according to Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who described the events in her memoir. Both companies eventually spent more than they expected. But Boeing has experienced setbacks at nearly every stage of development. When Wilmore and Williams launched in June, both NASA and Boeing projected the sense that all that was behind them. Officials were beaming, and ebullient in their remarks to the public: Finally, after years of delays, Boeing was on the right track, and on its way to catching up with SpaceX. Now, NASA managers sound like deflated parachutes, and Boeing executives have stopped attending press conferences altogether. (NASA said that Boeing engineers still believe that Starliner is safe to fly.)

Even after extensive testing with replicas on the ground this summer, engineers can’t understand the cause of Starliner’s current problem, those faulty thrusters. Nevertheless, Nelson says that Boeing will fly astronauts again. NASA previously asked Boeing to conduct a do-over of an uncrewed flight, after Starliner failed to reach the ISS on its first attempt. Two and a half years elapsed before Boeing completed a successful uncrewed mission. If another couple of years pass before NASA feels ready to put more astronauts on Starliner, Boeing may find itself barely contributing to the country’s astronaut commutes. The ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned and deorbited in 2030. The station will plunge into the ocean, torn from orbit by a spacecraft specially designed to take it down. NASA has already hired SpaceX to take care of that too.