SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that's a problem for America's space agency

extraextra

The article seems written in bad faith "SpaceX has told NASA it will stop flying Crew Dragon, the space agency’s only reliable astronaut transportation to the International Space Station, by or before 2030" Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean "Ars reported in October that SpaceX had stopped selling commercial launches on the Falcon 9 rocket for missions after the year 2028" Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)

scrubs

Excuse me? The long history of success for nasa with and without the esa is staggering to the good. I got more stories that jd salinger I (nasa) hold the title, and you're (spacex) just the challenger (paraphrase of beastie boy song shadrach et al) More seriously, nasa has purposely focused on satellites and robots for scientific research on purpose for a multitude of reasons including cost.

class3shock

The author interprets this: “What we’ve done at SpaceX is we’ve taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90 percent,” - Now, he said, SpaceX was applying that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute. As, "The question is whether Musk would devote his Falcon engineering team solely to Starship. Perhaps not." This is not really the right conclusion IMO. It does not take the same kind or size of engineering team that Falcon took to develop or support to build cooling systems for data centers. The data center work is going to be a small side project for a small number of engineers in a small number of disciplines. The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.