Here are the ways the US space program dies if Trump cancels SpaceX contracts

A remarkable schoolyard brawl erupted online Thursday between President Donald Trump and his former "First Buddy" Elon Musk during which the pair traded insults and barbs. The war of words reached a crescendo during the afternoon when Trump threatened Musk's federal contracts.

"The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social, at 2:37 pm ET.

Anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality understood that the "bromance" between the president of the United States and the most wealthy person in the world was going to blow up at some point, but even so, the online brouhaha that has played out Thursday is spectacular—at one point Musk suggested that Trump was in the Epstein files, for goodness' sake.

Much of what was said Thursday is almost certainly rhetoric, but it is perhaps worth taking a moment to step back and analyze what would happen if the federal government did terminate contracts and subsidies with Musk's largest and most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

SpaceX

Musk's space company is presently NASA's most essential contractor. With the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX provides the space agency's only operational transportation for crew members to the International Space Station. Additionally, when Northrop Grumman's Cygnus spacecraft was damaged in transit earlier this year, it left SpaceX as the only provider of cargo services to the space station for more than half a year.

If NASA were to terminate its contracts with SpaceX, it effectively would mean the end of the International Space Station. The problem with this is that SpaceX also holds the contract to safely de-orbit the space station, which is currently due to occur in 2030. With a mass of more than 400 metric tons, the space station will be the largest human-made object ever to return to Earth, and could cause substantial damage in populated areas if not safely de-orbited into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean.