Could SpaceX’s retirement of Falcon 9 spark a launch crisis?

SpaceX’s ubiquitous Falcon 9 rocket has lofted astronauts, NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft, the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope, the Space Force’s GPS satellites and thousands of the company’s Starlink Internet satellites into orbit over the past few years. By most any measure, the rocket is the most successful launch vehicle ever flown. But if SpaceX has its way, the Falcon 9 era will soon come to an end.

Since SpaceX engineers developed the innovative rocket and its reusable first stage in the 2000s and 2010s, it has become a mainstay for space access, accounting for 85 percent of U.S. launches in 2025. Now SpaceX plans to wind down the Falcon 9 within the next few years to better accommodate the company’s sprint toward using Starship, its fully reusable megarocket meant to spark another even greater spaceflight revolution. But unless and until Starship demonstrates Falcon 9–like reliability, SpaceX’s shift away from its current mainstay seems destined to produce major ripple effects across the space industry, affecting numerous customers.

From NASA and the Pentagon to start-ups, universities and international organizations, many entities depend on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. “Whenever you rely on one launch provider, especially one that’s commercial, you’re kind of at their whims,” says Kathleen Curlee, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

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The U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Force contracts using the Falcon 9 run through 2028, so those launches continue through that year, but Politico has reported that SpaceX has so far rebuffed Space Force efforts to secure further launches. Similarly, some companies have been unable to book future Falcon 9 flights as well, according to the Wall Street Journal. That means more uncertainties, and potential delays and cost increases for U.S. space launches.

Curlee expected such a decision by SpaceX. “I’m more surprised that people are so shocked this is happening,” she says. The company needs to pivot to its Starship program, she argues, and that may require retiring the Falcon family of rockets—not just the Falcon 9 but also the Falcon Heavy, a much beefier vehicle that also has partial reusability. Though Falcon 9 has been profitable, SpaceX’s business interests have been especially buoyed by Starlink, and the company is banking on the uncertain prospect of data centers in orbit, which would create yet more demand for Starship launches.

In SpaceX’s early years, major launch contracts from NASA helped prop up the company, which at the time was struggling to attract customers while developing and deploying Falcon 9’s precursor, the Falcon 1. SpaceX ultimately became the biggest success story of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo programs, allowing the space agency to send astronauts to the International Space Station without relying on Russia’s Soyuz rocket. In this relationship, NASA now seems the one more in need of favors: the space agency books most of its orbital trips and deep-space launches through SpaceX but represents only a fraction of the company’s total launch business.

Joshua Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Scientific American in a statement that “NASA and SpaceX are in regular communication and continue to work together on contract to launch cargo and crew for the safe operations of the International Space Station, as well as launch science, exploration, and research/technology missions through our launch services contracts.”

Finch also highlighted the agency’s collaboration with Boeing for astronauts’ trips to and from the space station. NASA had seen the company’s Starliner as a backup to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which flies atop the Falcon 9. Starliner has proven to be the much more expensive and less reliable option, however, with its development suffering numerous costly delays and its test flights going so poorly that one in 2024 stranded NASA astronauts at the space station for months. A Crew Dragon eventually brought that crew back home. NASA and Boeing plan for another uncrewed Starliner test flight as early as this December, followed by more crewed flights in 2028.

The Space Force has come to rely on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (or its heftier cousin, the Falcon Heavy) for launches of sensitive national-security-related spacecraft, including those for the Golden Dome missile defense program. “I hope we don’t just lose this technology. It seems like a tremendous waste, if there isn’t some way for someone to pick up this program and keep it running,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher who studies the private space sector. He suggests it’s conceivable that the Space Force or other parts of the U.S. government could pay SpaceX to license the Falcon 9 technology, effectively taking control of the program and freeing the company to pursue other priorities. “There’s so much value. It seems strange to let it go,” he says.

SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. A Space Force spokesperson, Rose Riley, tells Scientific American that the agency has Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches planned through fiscal year 2032, and that as many as six other companies will soon be in a position to provide national security launch services as well. “We have an inherent duty to plan for possible contingencies,” Riley says. “While we don’t expect to have to use them, we are talking through all scenarios and what options we can leverage should we need to.”

The prospects for Starship remain uncertain; its goal of full reusability would be a historic first for any orbital spacecraft—let alone the largest launch vehicle ever built. But many of its test flights so far have ended in fiery explosions; its next test, Flight 15, is slated for mid-November.

Even if SpaceX’s wildest dreams come true, with Starship soon entering routine service and ramping up to launch at an even higher cadence than Falcon 9, it’s unclear whether the huge rocket will have correspondingly huge demand. One glaring issue is that Starship presently lacks a payload fairing door of the sort most satellite customers currently need; instead it has a narrower aperture custom-made for ejecting batches of Starlink satellites. Another concern is the shifting landscape around artificial-intelligence-powering orbital data centers. On October 25 SpaceX continued its push into AI with a $40-billion debt-financing deal for data center GPUs, but the AI industry’s accumulation of debt now makes such deals more difficult. Despite that, Anthropic has reportedly become one of SpaceX’s biggest customers.

“Is this too big a risk? [SpaceX] takes big swings,” says Carissa Bryce Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and engineering contractor with NASA and the Space Force. Falcon 9 was once seen as unduly risky, too, she notes, when the rocket suffered high-visibility failures on its long path to routine flight and, eventually, industry dominance.

As SpaceX sunsets Falcon 9, some commercial customers are already scrambling to find new launch providers, Curlee says. The closest competitor to Starship, at least in the Earth-orbit launch market, is Blue Origin’s New Glenn, but that rocket exploded on its Cape Canaveral launchpad during a May 28 hotfire test and remains grounded. Blue Origin aims to have the pad and other infrastructure rebuilt by December. United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has its new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which first flew in 2024 but is now grounded as well after problems with its solid rocket booster during a launch in February. ULA announced on October 28 that it’s resuming Vulcan spaceflights in mid-November.

Other competitors include Rocket Lab, which has mostly cornered the small-launch market, as well as rising companies such as Firefly Aerospace, Stoke Space and Relativity Space. “When there’s a big profit opportunity, there’s nothing more powerful for getting competition going than a lot of money sitting on the table, and this is probably one of those situations where there’s a lot of business to be had,” Weinzierl says.

Nevertheless, he points out, thanks to Falcon 9 helping to lower the bar for launch access in recent years, space start-ups have been able to scrape together money from investors to try new spacecraft designs. If that bar rises again and costs go up in the absence of SpaceX’s tried-and-true workhorse, those nascent companies might never get off the ground.

International competition has emerged on the horizon as well, especially from China’s expanding space sector, which is seeking to develop homegrown reusable rocketry to rival SpaceX. China has begun launching satellites for customers in countries such as Oman and Thailand over the past couple of years. But some potential customers may be hesitant to go that route because current U.S. law restricts contractors working with China or Chinese-owned companies. That means anyone that launches a spacecraft aboard a Chinese rocket may have trouble subsequently contracting with NASA or the Space Force.

Europe’s space industry remains behind the U.S. and China, though it is attempting to catch up. France’s Arianespace has a heavy-lift rocket called Ariane 6, and its partially reusable successor is in development for the 2030s. On October 5 European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher proposed investing €10 billion (about 11 billion USD) over the next decade to develop a new launch system to deliver astronauts to orbit. European governments will weigh the idea at a mid-December meeting in Rome.

“ESA’s priority is to ensure reliable, resilient and autonomous European access to space. Our baseline approach is therefore clear: for ESA missions, we look first to European launch services and seek to maximize their use,” said Kathryn Fleet, an ESA spokesperson, in a statement to Scientific American. Fleet points to the Ariane 6 rocket and Vega-C, a medium-lift rocket, while looking forward to emerging options. These include German start-up Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket, which achieved its inaugural spaceflight in September, a milestone for the European commercial space sector. Fleet also said that working with Soyuz again is “not on the table,” because Soyuz launches from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana were suspended in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

SpaceX is, of course, led by CEO and almost-trillionaire Elon Musk, a mercurial figure active in far-right extremist politics in the U.S. and abroad. SpaceX has also swayed foreign policy, notably in Ukraine, such as by restricting Starlink Internet access.

So far, however, such incidents haven’t significantly affected SpaceX’s ability to ink lucrative government launch contracts, and federal agencies have found SpaceX to be the best option in terms of capability and price, Weinzierl says. He adds, “At the same time, no government wants to be reliant on a single company, so I imagine there will be substantial and sustained interest in supporting competitors to SpaceX.”