Last month, Donald Trump issued his first direct order to Elon Musk as president: go fetch the astronauts who flew to the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner last year and return them to Earth.
NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, Trump claimed, had been abandoned by the Biden Administration after they docked at the ISS last June; their mission to test Starliner had been meant to last only eight days.
NASA, with whom SpaceX commands lucrative contracts, is set to experience a shake-up under new chief Jared Isaacman: a pilot, astronaut and entrepreneur who’s worked with Musk in the past.
Steadying the ship in such instances is SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, who once called Musk “one of the best humans I know”.
There have been faulty rockets, PR disasters, and attempts to undermine their success from rival companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin (which has sued NASA on the basis that SpaceX are monopolising contracts).
