Trump threatened to cancel Musk's contract, endangering the United States' space ambitions

US President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have publicly broken off relations. Not only do they confront each other online, but they will also have real consequences. Trump threatened to terminate the government contract with Musk, and Musk announced the retirement of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which is likely to directly impact the core part of the US space program.

Bloomberg reported that Musk announced on Thursday afternoon (June 5th) that SpaceX will immediately launch the retirement of the Dragon spacecraft. As the world's most powerful rocket launch company in terms of carrying capacity, SpaceX also holds billions of dollars in federal contracts, including launching key national security satellites for the Pentagon and developing spacecraft capable of sending American astronauts to the moon within as short as two years.

Musk's decision to retire the Dragon spacecraft was triggered by Trump's threat to tear up all federal contracts with Musk, which are a key source of revenue for SpaceX.

Musk officially stepped down from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the end of May and launched a series of attacks on Trump's proud "big and beautiful" tax and spending bill and tariff policy on social media platform X. The two then engaged in an online war of words.

The current question is whether the two will fulfill what they said.

"Cancelling the SpaceX contract will have a huge domino effect on many key space-dependent functional departments of the US government, among which the most core departments are the US Department of Defense and NASA," said Swep, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is the main tool for NASA to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The Dragon spacecraft is the only American spacecraft that can reliably send humans into space orbit and return to Earth.

Swoop said, "At present, SpaceX's position is irreplaceable."

SpaceX is one of the world's most valuable start-ups, with a market value of 350 billion US dollars. Since 2000, it has received more than 22 billion US dollars in unclassified contracts from the US Department of Defense and NASA.

NASA also awarded SpaceX another $843 million contract to build the "American Deorbiting Vehicle" to guide the International Space Station safely back into the Earth's atmosphere after its retirement in 2030.

To send American astronauts to the moon, NASA signed a contract worth approximately 4 billion US dollars with SpaceX. Due to the setback of Boeing's "Starliner" program, NASA has recently relied more on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft to carry out missions to the International Space Station.