SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket conducts a test flight from Starbase, Texas, on Monday, September 28, 2026. Starship is the largest rocket ever built, but it cannot yet carry astronauts.
Eric Gay/AP
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Eric Gay/AP
Later today, SpaceX is planning the most ambitious test ever of its massive new Starship rocket. If all goes well, it will take off from a platform in south Texas, circle the Earth, then land vertically on the same platform 22.5 hours later.
The test would be a major milestone for a rocket that company founder Elon Musk hopes will one day carry astronauts to Mars. But experts say Starship’s rapid development could also end up blocking one of the company’s biggest promoters over the years: NASA.
Indeed, as SpaceX ramps up its new rocket, it has announced that it will stop flying a much smaller rocket called Falcon 9. Falcon 9 launches the company’s Dragon capsule, which is currently the only U.S. spacecraft capable of carrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
“As the Dragon has become a very capable and reliable vehicle, it has become the de facto way for astronauts to get to orbit,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a company that tracks the space industry.
According to a NASA announcement in September, the space agency signed a contract with SpaceX for three additional flights to the International Space Station. This would only allow Dragon to fly until 2028, assuming missions are flown consecutively in six-month increments and no further flights are contracted with SpaceX.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell compared the Dragon Capsule to a minivan. “The road trip to Mars is six months, so you don’t want to be in the minibus,” she said. “We definitely want to move from old technology to new technology.”
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
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TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
The space station is currently scheduled to retire in 2030.
“I love you guys”
The current problem facing the space agency marks a sharp reversal from earlier times, when SpaceX relied heavily on NASA. In 2008, following multiple Falcon 9 failures, the space launch company was on the ropes.
“At that point we were running on steam, we had basically no money,” Elon Musk told CBS’s 60 Minutes in a 2014 interview.
Then, just days before Christmas, NASA signed a big contract.
“I couldn’t even hold the phone, I just blurted out, ‘I love you guys!'” Musk said.
Over the next decade, the steady diet of contracts from NASA and eventually the Pentagon accounted for a large share of the company’s revenue. But all that changed in 2020, when SpaceX launched a subscription satellite internet service called Starlink. Starlink subscriptions quickly eclipsed the money generated from rocket launches.
NASA SpaceX Crew-13 (LR) crew members, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, NASA astronauts Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov exit the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building before launch at the Kennedy Space Center October 1, 2026 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX is currently the primary means of transportation for NASA astronauts attempting to reach the ISS.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America
Now, according to SpaceX’s latest financial report, the company made about $2.1 billion in revenue from space launches through September of this year. In contrast, Starlink brought in about $12.8 billion, while its fast-growing AI business brought in about $10.9 billion.
End of the Falcon
Starship is at the heart of SpaceX’s newest and biggest ventures. The space launch company is already using it to put its new, powerful V3 satellites for Starlink into orbit. Later, Musk said he wanted the rocket to carry data centers into space.
“Once Starship is reliably flying multiple times per week, it makes sense to shift SpaceX’s very scarce engineering and production resources to Starship to achieve a multiple times per day launch rate, which means shutting down Falcon,” Musk said on X earlier this year.
“We definitely want to move from old technology to new technology,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said at the All In Summit in Los Angeles in September. “A Falcon 9 with a Dragon capsule on top, it’s like a minivan. … The road trip to Mars is six months – so you don’t want to be in the minivan.”
The problem is that the minivan is perfect for taking astronauts on a short jaunt to the space station. In fact, it’s currently the only American option for making the trip.
Henry said building space capsules is time-consuming and expensive. And it turns out that NASA is about the only one willing to pay, making it a very small market for a company like what SpaceX has become.
“Today there is no strong commercial market for human spaceflight,” he said.
Launch gap
The retirement of the Falcon rocket will have enormous impacts beyond human spaceflight. A recent analysis from Quilty Space found that the commercial market could be short some 150 launches by 2030, and that the Pentagon would have had to scramble to find transportation for national security satellites. In a statement to NPR, the U.S. Space Force said it had secured Falcon 9 launches through 2028 and was “confident” that other providers would be able to take over.
None of this is likely to change SpaceX’s mind, according to Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, a telecommunications analytics firm that tracks SpaceX.
The company has grown well beyond its launch business, he said. “SpaceX now has a lot of work to do.”
In particular, “NASA doesn’t make a lot of money,” he said. “While it seems likely that individual missions will be profitable, these are small potatoes.”
It’s still unclear when SpaceX will retire the Falcon 9 rocket. The company did not respond to NPR’s request for comment, but in his public comments at the summit, Shotwell hinted that a rival company, Boeing, might go to the station instead.
“Boeing got paid, I think, probably more than we did to develop their human capsule. So we’re just going to let them do some business,” she said. “They should fly their capsule.”
Boeing’s capsule, known as the Starliner, has been plagued with problems throughout its development. In 2024, the failure of the vehicle’s first attempt to take astronauts into space meant that a planned eight-day mission aboard the ISS turned into a nine-month stay. The astronauts returned home aboard a SpaceX vehicle in March of the following year. The Starliner’s next test flight is expected to take place over the winter, with a crewed flight sometime in 2028.
For Farrar, SpaceX’s choices make sense for its business, but he questions whether NASA deserves better. “It’s basically because of them that SpaceX didn’t go bankrupt,” he said. “One would hope there would be a little loyalty.”
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