Both the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA quietly moved this week to urge competitors to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to expedite their development of alternative rockets and spacecraft after a spat on social media earlier in the week between U.S. President Trump and Elon Musk.

According to reports from the Washington Post, officials were extremely concerned by the conflict between Trump and Musk, during which the President threatened to pull government contracts from companies owned and operated by Musk, like SpaceX and Tesla, leading Musk to announce, but later recant, that SpaceX would begin to immediately decommission its “Dragon” spacecraft, stunning officials at NASA, potentially leaving them with no way to transport astronauts or cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).

One NASA official said that watching the feud between Trump and Musk play out on social media Thursday at first was “entertaining.” But once Musk called for decommissioning Dragon, “it turned really terrifying,” with a similar reaction happening at the Pentagon.

Since Thursday’s exchange, at least four commercial space companies, Sierra Space, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, have been contacted by government officials about the status of their rockets and when they might be available for government missions, due to ongoing concerns about SpaceX and their reliability under Elon Musk.

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