The social media-driven feud between President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk may have simmered down a bit, with the rhetoric cooling and Musk even deleting some of his ill-considered posts about Trump from X and then apologizing for them.

But the shockwaves generated by the tit-for-tat insults and threats still reverberate through NASA and the commercial space sector.

When Trump threatened to pull all of SpaceX’s government contracts and Musk responded by threatening to decommission the Dragon spacecraft, an apocalyptic scenario that would have cripped NASA loomed. Fortunately, both men have since backed off.

Even so, according to the Washington Post, NASA and the Defense Department are quietly urging commercial space companies to hurry the development of hardware that can compete with what SpaceX has to offer.

Encouraging competition with SpaceX is sound policy regardless of the relationship between Trump and Musk. However, that competition is months, if not years, in the future.

The next flight of the Boeing Starliner, which failed so spectacularly in 2024, will be early next year at the earliest. The Blue Origin New Glenn, an answer to the SpaceX Falcon family of rockets, may launch

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