Elon Musk’s SpaceX is paying $2.2 million to acquire a spacecraft parachute company

As it gets ready to help NASA in going back to the moon, SpaceX is acquiring a parachute company.

The business that creates the parachutes that aid in the company’s Dragon rockets’ return to Earth, Pioneer Aerospace, is being acquired by Elon Musk’s spacecraft manufacturer. Pioneer’s parent company recently filed for bankruptcy, and according to a Florida bankruptcy filing, SpaceX will pay $2.2 million for the company. First to report on the news was The Information.

This is SpaceX’s first acquisition of this kind, having previously paid an estimated $524 million for the satellite company Swarm in 2021 in order to grow its Starlink satellite network.

Pioneer was founded in 1938 and provided parachutes for several SpaceX and NASA missions. These include several crewed trips to the International Space Station and the “Osiris Rex” mission, which returned samples from an asteroid that is 4.6 billion years old to Earth.

It comes at a time when SpaceX is gearing up to be a key player in NASA’s moon landing plan. NASA intends to send astronauts to the moon in 2025 for the first time since 1972 using SpaceX’s reusable Starship rocket system.

But SpaceX needs to make sure the Starship launches without blowing up first.

While the spacecraft safely separated from its launcher, the second test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built ended in another fireball earlier this month.

Musk has high goals for Starship that go beyond returning humans to the moon. The CEO of SpaceX has stated that Starship will eventually transport people anywhere on Earth in an hour and bring humans to Mars.