Breaking apart is difficult to do — particularly when one occasion is a billionaire with near-unassailable dominance of the nation’s means to launch issues into house, and the opposite is a president who has staked a good portion of his legacy on wildly bold space-based tasks.
As President Donald Trump and his erstwhile monetary backer and former DOGE boss Elon Musk traded blows on social media Thursday, the president at one level posted, “The best method to save cash in our Finances, Billions and Billions of {Dollars}, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I used to be all the time stunned that Biden didn’t do it!”
This prompted Musk to announce that he was decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, used to move astronauts to the Worldwide House Station, although he later backed down from the menace.
Trump might quickly discover, nevertheless, that canceling Musk’s contracts is rather a lot tougher than promoting his Tesla, notably if he needs to pursue targets like his much-vaunted Golden Dome missile protection mission.
To get to house, the US wants SpaceX
Throughout President Joe Biden’s administration, considerations had been certainly raised about Musk’s profitable authorities contracts in addition to his entry to categorised protection data, given his partisan political actions (uncommon for a significant protection contractor), communications with international leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and ties to the Chinese language authorities.
However as Vox reported final 12 months, unwinding the federal government’s relationship with Musk’s corporations is a close to impossibility proper now, notably with regards to SpaceX. The corporate is solely higher at launching huge numbers of objects into house than any of its opponents, and it’s not shut: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was liable for 84 % of all satellite tv for pc launches final 12 months, and the constellation of greater than 7,000 Starlink communications satellites accounts for round 65 % of all operational satellites in orbit.
The reusable Falcon 9 has turn into the house launch workhorse of selection for a US navy and intelligence group that’s ever extra depending on satellites for communications and surveillance.
“If one aspect or the opposite severed that relationship, which I don’t suppose is sensible, you’d in a short time see a backlog of navy satellites ready for launch,” mentioned Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and house protection knowledgeable on the American Enterprise Institute. Formidable plans just like the Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace’s ongoing mission to launch a constellation of intelligence and surveillance satellites for navy use would come to a “screeching halt,” mentioned Harrison.
The US navy can also be more and more reliant on SpaceX for cell web connectivity by way of a specialised military-only model of Starlink referred to as Starshield.
For NASA, the state of affairs is, if something, much more dire, as proven final March when two US astronauts returned, months late, from the Worldwide House Station on a SpaceX Dragon capsule when issues had been detected on the Boeing craft that introduced them into orbit on its first ever flight.
Dropping SpaceX “would mainly simply finish the US participation within the house station,” mentioned David Burbach, an affiliate professor and house coverage knowledgeable on the Naval Struggle Faculty.
NASA’s house shuttle program shut down in 2011. Boeing’s Starliner might be years from being a viable different, and going again to counting on Russian rockets — because the US did for practically a decade between the tip of the House Shuttle and the appearance of Dragon — would in all probability be a tricky promote nowadays.
Burbach, talking in his private capability, not as a consultant of the US navy or warfare faculty, mentioned such a break “can be the sort of factor that would set off one thing actually drastic” such because the White Home utilizing the Protection Manufacturing Act to take management of this system. It’s not shocking Musk rapidly backed down from the menace.
NASA’s ongoing Artemis program, which goals to finally return people to the Moon and set up a everlasting lunar house station, can also be closely depending on SpaceX’s Starship launch car, as are long term plans for a mission to Mars. These are (or at the least had been) priorities for the White Home: The moon and Mars missions are the one components of NASA’s funds that had been elevated within the president’s latest funds request and the president talked about planting “the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars” in his inaugural handle.
Mars is, to place it mildly, one thing of a fixation for Musk, and it’s arduous to think about an ongoing US program to get there with out his involvement.
Trump’s golden goals might require Musk
A real Trump-Musk rift would even have implications for “Golden Dome,” the bold plan to “defend the homeland” from ballistic missiles, drones, hypersonic cruise missiles, and different aerial threats.
Plans for Golden Dome are nonetheless a little bit imprecise and no contracts for its building have been awarded but, however SpaceX is reportedly a frontrunner to construct a constellation of tons of of latest satellites to detect missile launches and decide if they’re headed towards the US, and presumably even intercept them from house.
In keeping with Reuters, SpaceX is bidding for parts of the mission in partnership with Anduril and Palantir, two different protection tech corporations additionally led by staunch Trump backers. SpaceX’s imaginative and prescient for the satellite tv for pc community reportedly envisions it as a “subscription service,” during which the federal government would pay for entry, relatively than proudly owning the system outright, a mannequin that will presumably give Musk rather more leverage over how Golden Dome is developed and deployed.
Critics of this system cost that it’s little greater than a giveaway to Musk and his allies and Democratic members of Congress have raised considerations about his involvement.
Advocates for this system, together with the Heritage Basis, which known as for investments in ballistic and hypersonic missile protection in its Venture 2025 doc, have cited SpaceX’s success with Starlink and Starshield as proof-of-concept for his or her argument that deploying a layer of tons of or hundreds of satellites for missile protection is extra sensible right this moment than it was within the days of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” mission.
Even when Golden Dome might be efficient, which many doubt, Trump’s said purpose of having it operational with “successful price near one hundred pc” in “lower than three years” for round $175 billion (the Congressional Finances Workplace tasks half a trillion {dollars}) is eyebrow-raising. The Pentagon had already backed away from the three-year timeline even earlier than the president started feuding with the one particular person on the earth who’s constructed something near this.
“Even for SpaceX, it could be difficult,” mentioned Burbach. “I don’t suppose every other firm has the aptitude. They’re actually out within the lead on meeting line satellite tv for pc functionality.”
Some consultants suppose Golden Dome might be reconfigured with a larger position for land-based radar and interceptors, however this may nearly definitely put it in need of Trump’s expansive imaginative and prescient. As nuclear knowledgeable Ankit Panda succinctly put it on Thursday, “Golden Dome is cooked.”
If anybody had an excellent day on Thursday, it was Musk’s fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos. In January, Bezos’s house firm Blue Origin carried out its first profitable launch of New Glenn, a reusable rocket meant to compete with SpaceX’s game-changing Falcon for contracts together with navy launches. The corporate has additionally begun launching satellites for its Kuiper communications community, a possible competitor to Starlink.
Each tasks have suffered from lengthy delays and have a protracted approach to go to meet up with Musk’s house behemoth, nevertheless it’s nonetheless presumably excellent news for the corporate that their fundamental competitor isn’t any longer actually sleeping ft from the White Home.
Discovering methods to at the least encourage competitors with Musk, if not minimize him free completely, would doubtless have been a precedence for a Kamala Harris administration, and will now be one for Trump as nicely. In response to Vox’s inquiries to the White Home about the way forward for SpaceX’s contracts, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded in an emailed assertion, “President Trump is concentrated on making our nation nice once more and passing the One Huge Stunning Invoice.” SpaceX didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Although the 2 might not be talking, Trump is prone to discover it tougher than he thinks to get out of the Elon Musk enterprise completely.
