June 6, 2025, 5:23 PM 3:07 Elon Musk attends a press conference with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, May 30, 2025. Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images At the time, Jernigan said space programs in Japan, Europe, the U.S. and Russia delivered cargo, but now just the latter two do so. Dragon 1 provided cargo service to the ISS for 10 years, between 2012 and 2020, before it was retired. SpaceX launched Dragon 2 with two versions: one as a replacement for the Dragon 1 spacecraft and the second as a capsule that could take crew into space. In September 2014, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX and its Crew Dragon spacecraft as one of the companies to transport U.S. astronauts to the ISS. Michael Liemohn, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, said SpaceX has been essential to NASA's commercial cargo program. "[SpaceX has been] very important," he told ABC News. "When we retired the space shuttles, our only way [for] sending humans into low Earth orbit was to contract with Russia on a Soyuz capsule, and that's why NASA commissioned both Boeing and SpaceX to build new crew capsules so that there would be capability there." Elon Musk attends a press conference with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, May 30, 2025. Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images Jernigan -- the Rice Space Institute executive director -- noted that SpaceX has been more successful than other candidates including Boeing and its spacecraft Starliner. In June 2024, two NASA astronauts performed the first astronaut-crewed flight of Starliner capsule to the ISS. What was supposed to be a mission lasting about one week turned into a nine-month stay aboard the ISS due to several issues with Starliner and NASA's decision to add the two astronauts to the ISS crew. Eventually, in March 2025, SpaceX's Crew-10 successfully docked at the ISS, bringing four new astronauts to work on the floating lab and setting up the return to Earth of the two astronauts, as well as a third NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut. "Right now, the only U.S. provider [for crew] is SpaceX, and so not having SpaceX would be a big deal," Jernigan said. "My speculation would be that if the SpaceX Dragon went away, it would be difficult to ramp up Boeing to replace SpaceX." He noted that such a change would be costly. "So if we had to do without SpaceX, we would really have to shift gears and infuse a lot of capital to try to get back our alternatives up to speed," he said. MORE: SpaceX successfully launches 1st humans to travel over Earth's poles SpaceX also plays a role in the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years and eventually set up a permanent base there before heading to Mars. SpaceX is the lunar lander provider for the first flight and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is the second lunar lander provider. If Musk were to decommission the Dragon spacecraft and no longer have contracts with NASA, it would be hard for Blue Origin to get up to speed, according to Jah from the University of Texas at Austin "If Dragon goes away and then it's just Blue Origin, we would have to put more funding resources not just into trying to get Blue Origin to launch sooner, but also in being able to test all those technologies in ways that they haven't been tested yet," he said. "Like, so far, the SpaceX technologies have been very successful in getting people into and out of space. That has not happened yet with the Blue Origin technologies and, at most, they've only had sub-orbital flights." Related Topics