KEY POINTS
- Elon Musk said SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft “immediately” because of threats by Donald Trump to cancel government contracts with Musk’s businesses.
- Musk’s announcement on his social media site X escalated a war of words with Trump that began after the Tesla CEO criticized the major tax bill being pushed by the Republican president.
- A SpaceX Dragon capsule brought two NASA astronauts back to Earth in March after they were stranded for months at the International Space Station by a Boeing Starliner capsule.
Soooooo… Kind of…
I didn’t check the cargo numbers but for Crewed missions we have some nice estimates from the OIG in 2024 based on the crew program development costs and the built-in 6 flight missions we got for the contracts:
Soyuz was ~ 20 million a seat in 2007, 2013 it was ~ 55 million a seat, and 2014-2018 it was 62 million a seat, now it’s that 86 number.
Funny thing is happening at SpaceX recently, namely NASA used up all 6 flights that were 55 million a seat, so they needed to extend for flights 7-9 and 10-14
In February 2022 NASA Extended their contract with SpaceX for flights 7-9 at around 258 million per flight (so ~64.5 million per seat) and again in June 2022 for flights 10-14 at 288 million per flight (so ~72 million per seat)
So SpaceX came out of the gate with their handfuls of investor cash and subsidized the original contracts, but they’re likely rapidly increasing prices now that they’ve burned through most of that runway.
I wasnt really thinking about crewed mission tbh, more the cost per tonne which Space X certainly brought down dramatically (though not quite by an order of magnitude).