Why Trump probably can't cut Musk loose

Vox

20 hours ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.
Elon Musk gives a tour to President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers of the control room before a test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.Breaking up is hard to do — especially when one party is a billionaire with near-unassailable dominance of the nation's ability to launch things into space, and the other is a president who has staked a significant portion of his legacy on wildly ambitious space-based projects.
As President Donald Trump and his erstwhile financial backer and former DOGE boss Elon Musk traded blows on social media Thursday, the president at one point posted, '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!'
This prompted Musk to announce that he was decommissioning SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, used to transport astronauts to the International Space Station, though he later backed down from the threat.
Trump may soon find, however, that canceling Musk's contracts is a lot harder than selling his Tesla, particularly if he wants to pursue goals like his much-vaunted Golden Dome missile defense project.
To get to space, the US needs SpaceX
During President Joe Biden's administration, concerns were indeed raised about Musk's lucrative government contracts as well as his access to classified defense information, given his partisan political activities (unusual for a major defense contractor), communications with foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and ties to the Chinese government.
But as Vox reported last year, unwinding the government's relationship with Musk's companies is a near impossibility right now, particularly when it comes to SpaceX. The company is simply better at launching massive numbers of objects into space than any of its competitors, and it's not close: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was responsible for 84 percent of all satellite launches last year, and the constellation of more than 7,000 Starlink communications satellites accounts for around 65 percent of all operational satellites in orbit.
The reusable Falcon 9 has become the space launch workhorse of choice for a US military and intelligence community that is ever more dependent on satellites for communications and surveillance.
'If one side or the other severed that relationship, which I don't think is practical, you would very quickly see a backlog of military satellites waiting for launch,' said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and space defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute. Ambitious plans like the National Reconnaissance Office's ongoing project to launch a constellation of intelligence and surveillance satellites for military use would come to a 'screeching halt,' said Harrison.
The US military is also increasingly reliant on SpaceX for mobile internet connectivity via a specialized military-only version of Starlink known as Starshield.
For NASA, the situation is, if anything, even more dire, as shown last March when two US astronauts returned, months late, from the International Space Station on a SpaceX Dragon capsule when problems were detected on the Boeing craft that brought them into orbit on its first ever flight.
Losing SpaceX 'would basically just end the US participation in the space station,' said David Burbach, an associate professor and space policy expert at the Naval War College.
NASA's space shuttle program shut down in 2011. Boeing's Starliner is probably years from being a viable alternative, and going back to relying on Russian rockets — as the US did for nearly a decade between the end of the Space Shuttle and the advent of Dragon — would probably be a tough sell these days.
Burbach, speaking in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the US military or war college, said such a break 'would be the kind of thing that could trigger something truly drastic' such as the White House using the Defense Production Act to take control of the program. It's not surprising Musk quickly backed down from the threat.
NASA's ongoing Artemis program, which aims to eventually return humans to the Moon and establish a permanent lunar space station, is also heavily dependent on SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle, as are longer term plans for a mission to Mars. These are (or at least were) priorities for the White House: The moon and Mars missions are the only parts of NASA's budget that were increased in the president's recent budget request and the president mentioned planting 'the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars' in his inaugural address.
Mars is, to put it mildly, something of a fixation for Musk, and it's hard to imagine an ongoing US program to get there without his involvement.
Trump's golden dreams may require Musk
A true Trump-Musk rift would also have implications for 'Golden Dome,' the ambitious plan to 'protect the homeland' from ballistic missiles, drones, hypersonic cruise missiles, and other aerial threats.
Plans for Golden Dome are still a little vague and no contracts for its construction have been awarded yet, but SpaceX is reportedly a frontrunner to build a constellation of hundreds of new satellites to detect missile launches and determine if they are headed toward the United States, and possibly even intercept them from space.
According to Reuters, SpaceX is bidding for portions of the project in partnership with Anduril and Palantir, two other defense tech companies also led by staunch Trump backers. SpaceX's vision for the satellite network reportedly envisions it as a 'subscription service,' in which the government would pay for access, rather than owning the system outright, a model that would presumably give Musk much more leverage over how Golden Dome is developed and deployed.
Critics of the program charge that it is little more than a giveaway to Musk and his allies and Democratic members of Congress have raised concerns about his involvement.
Advocates for the program, including the Heritage Foundation, which called for investments in ballistic and hypersonic missile defense in its Project 2025 document, have cited SpaceX's success with Starlink and Starshield as proof-of-concept for their argument that deploying a layer of hundreds or thousands of satellites for missile defense is more practical today than it was in the days of President Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' project.
Even if Golden Dome could be effective, which many doubt, Trump's stated goal of having it operational with 'a success rate close to 100 percent' in 'less than three years' for around $175 billion (the Congressional Budget Office projects half a trillion dollars) is eyebrow-raising. The Pentagon had already backed away from the three-year timeline even before the president began feuding with the only person in the world who's built anything close to this.
'Even for SpaceX, it would be challenging,' said Burbach. 'I don't think any other company has the capability. They're really out in the lead on assembly line satellite capability.'
Some experts think Golden Dome could be reconfigured with a greater role for land-based radar and interceptors, but this would almost certainly put it short of Trump's expansive vision. As nuclear expert Ankit Panda succinctly put it on Thursday, 'Golden Dome is cooked.'
Is there an alternative?
If anyone had a good day on Thursday, it was Musk's fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos. In January, Bezos's space company Blue Origin carried out its first successful launch of New Glenn, a reusable rocket meant to compete with SpaceX's game-changing Falcon for contracts including military launches. The company has also begun launching satellites for its Kuiper communications network, a potential competitor to Starlink.
Both projects have suffered from long delays and have a long way to go to catch up with Musk's space behemoth, but it's still presumably good news for the company that their main competitor is no longer literally sleeping feet from the White House.
Finding ways to at least encourage competition with Musk, if not cut him loose entirely, would likely have been a priority for a Kamala Harris administration, and may now be one for Trump as well. In response to Vox's questions to the White House about the future of SpaceX's contracts, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded in an emailed statement, 'President Trump is focused on making our country great again and passing the One Big Beautiful Bill.' SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.