How much the US federal government pays SpaceX

Source. Every number on this page is fetched live from the public USAspending.gov API on every page load — no build-step snapshot, no pre-fetched JSON, no cached value. USAspending publishes the federal procurement record under a public-domain license, mandated by the DATA Act. The page restricts the query to prime-contract award type codes (A, B, C, D — BPA Calls, Purchase Orders, Delivery Orders, and Definitive Contracts), excluding grants, cooperative agreements, loans, and direct payments.

Vendor-alias map. The page sums across the alias map below. SpaceX's prime contracts — including the Starshield and Starlink connectivity awards, which run through the main corporate entity via DISA and the Space Force — resolve to SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP. The STARLINK alias is carried as a forward-looking catch for the separate STARLINK TECHNOLOGIES LLC recipient, which currently shows no prime-contract obligations. If SpaceX adds a new federal-contracting entity, this list is the place to extend it.

# /search/spending_by_category/recipient/  filters.recipient_search_text
recipient_search_text: [
  "SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES",  # SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP. (all launch + connectivity)
  "STARLINK"                           # STARLINK TECHNOLOGIES LLC (forward-looking; currently $0)
]
award_type_codes: ["A", "B", "C", "D"]   # prime contracts only

Classified contracts are not here — and that matters more for SpaceX. Black-budget and otherwise-classified contracts do not appear in USAspending. SpaceX's National Reconnaissance Office launch portfolio and parts of the Starshield national-security business include classified work whose dollar value is not public, so the page does not estimate it. The headline counter and the trend chart are the public number; treat them as a known undercount of total federal spend with SpaceX.

Non-contract federal funding is not here either. A meaningful slice of SpaceX's historical NASA relationship ran through Space Act Agreements and funded SAAs (the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and Commercial Crew development era), and some procurement runs through Other Transaction Authority vehicles. These do not always appear as standard contract obligations under award type codes A–D, so the live number reflects contracts, not every federal dollar SpaceX has received.

Subawards / flow-through are not here. If SpaceX is a subcontractor on another prime's award, USAspending records those dollars under the prime's recipient entity, not under SpaceX's. USAspending's separate subaward dataset is noisy and incomplete; it is not joined into this page.

Commercial and foreign-government launches are not here. US federal customers only. SpaceX's commercial-launch, Starlink-consumer, and foreign-government revenue is company-side — it lives on the SpaceX Financials page, not in this federal procurement record.

Named-program labels. The "Top contracts" table carries a named-program pill (e.g., Human Landing System or NSSL Phase 3) above each award's official description, where the program name is publicly documented in a primary source (NASA / Space Force / SDA announcement, GAO filing, contract notification). The lookup is conservative — awards without a publicly-documented program name keep the boilerplate USAspending description and skip the pill.

Cross-reference for the company-side view. The SpaceX Financials page carries a curated roster of named headline awards (HLS, Commercial Crew, NSSL Phase 3, Starshield, NRO) and the S-1's federal-concentration risk factor. That roster is a subset; this page is the live full record of every public prime-contract obligation. The two triangulate — the difference is explained by classified work, Space Act Agreements and OTAs, timing (announced award value vs. obligation), and subaward flow-through.

Last alias-map verification: 2026-06-25. Build script: none — this page reads live from USAspending on every load.