Breaking is difficult to do, especially when one of the parties is multimillionaire with an almost insecible domain of the nation’s ability to launch things to space, and the other is a president who bet a significant part of his inherited space projects.
While President Donald Trump and his former financial sponsor and former chief of Lege, Elon Musk, exchanged blows to social networks on Thursday, the president at one time published: “The easiest way of money in our budget, billions of millions and billions of Diday are of alminate and was alminates’s.
This led Musk to announce that he was dismantling Spacex’s Dragon spacecraft, used to transport astronauts to the International Space Station, although he then backed away from the threat.
However, Trump can soon find that canceling Musk contracts is much more difficult than selling his Tesla, particularly if Hey Hens seeks objectives such as his very collected Defense project of Golden Dome missiles.
To get to space, the United States needs Spacex
During the administration of President Joe Biden, concerns were raised about the lucrative government contracts of Musk, as well as their access to classified defense information, given its partisan political activities (unusual for an important defense contractor), communications with foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and the links with the Chinese government.
But as Vox reported last year, unwinding the government’s relationship with Musk companies is almost impossible at this time, particularly when it comes to Spacex. The company is simply better to launch a massive number of objects to the space than any of its competitors, and it is not close: the Falcon 9 of Spacex rocket was responsible for 84 percent of all the satellite launchs of the communication last year of last year of more Thandlites or all the operational satellites in orbit.
The reusable Falcon 9 has become the spatial launch battle horse for a military community and American intelligence that is increasingly depending on satellites for communications and surveillance.
“If one side or the other cut that relationship, which I do not think it is practical, it would quickly see a backlog or military satellites waiting for the launch,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and survey space defense. Ambitious plans such as the current project of the National Recognition Office to launch a constellation of intelligence and surveillance satellites for military use would reach a “chillidos arrest,” said Harrison.
The US army also depends more and more Spacex for mobile internet connectivity through a specialized version of Starlink’s military known as Starshield.
For NASA, the situation is, in any case, equally more serious, as shown last March when two American astronauts returned, months late, of the International Space Station in a Spacex Estragon capsule when problems were detected in the Boeing ship it brought.
Losing Spacex “basically would end the participation of the United States in the space station,” said David Burbach, associate professor and spatial policy expert at the Naval War College.
NASA’s space transforder program was closed in 2011. The Boeing Starliner is likely years of being a viable alternative, and trusting again in the Russian rockets, as the United States did for almost a decade between the space ferry and the advent of Dagon.
Burbach, speaking in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the US Army. Uu. Or the University of War, said such rest “would be the child of the child who could truly try it”, as the Law of Use of the White House to take control of defense production. It is not surprising that Musk quickly retired from the threat.
The artemis program on the ongoing NASA, whose objective is to any human lace human and establishes a permanent lunar space station, also depends largely on the spacex spacecraft launch vehicle, as well as long -term plans for a mission to Mars. These are (or at least they were) priorities for the White House: the Moon and Mars missions are the only parts of the NASA budget that were embedded in the recent request for budget of the President and President Mentisioned Planting “The Stars and Stripes on the Planet Mars” in its INAIT.
Mars is, to put it gently, a kind of fixation for Musk, and it is difficult to imagine an ONBOng US program to get there without their participation.
Trump’s golden dreams may require musk
A true Trump-Musk crack would also have implications for “Golden Dome”, the ambitious plan to “protect the homeland” of 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 Bone Awarded Yet, But Spacex is reported Frontrunner to Build a Constellation of Hundred Satellites to detect missile towe -And -mosss and determine From space.
According to Reuters, Spacex is offering in parts of the project in association with Anduril and Palantir, two other technological defense companies also led by the firm sponsors of Trump. According to the reports, Spacex’s vision for the satellite network imagines it as a “subscription service”, in which the Government would pay access, instead of having the system directly, a model that presumes to give much more influence.
Program critics accuse that it is little more than a draw for Musk and its Democratic allies and members of Congress have raised Conerns about their participation.
The defenders of the program, including the Heritage Foundation, which requested investments in Balistic and Hyperonic Antimisile Defense in their Document of the 2025 project, have cited the success of Spacex with Starlink and Starshield as proof of concept for the most practical Toup Defense today than in the days of the project of President Ronald Real “Star Wars”.
Even if Golden Dome could be effective, what many doubt, Trump’s declared objective of having it operational with “a success rate close to 100 percent” in “less than three years” for around $ 175 billion (the Congress Budget Office in Projects.
“Only for Spacex, it would be a challenge,” Burbach said. “I don’t think any other company has the capacity. They are the reality of the satellite capacity of the assembly line in the assembly line.”
Some experts think that Golden Dome could be reconfigured with a more important role for radar and terrestrial interceptors, but this surely does not correspond to Trump’s expansive vision. As the nuclear expert Ankit Panda expressed it succinctly on Thursday, “Golden Dome is cooked.”
If someone had a good day on Thursday, it was Musk’s billionaire fellow Jeff Bezos. In January, the Bezos Space Company, Blue Origin, carried out its first successful launch of New Glenn, a reusable rocket destined to compete with the hawk that changes the Spacex game for contracts, including military releases. The company has also begun to launch satellites for its Kuiper communications network, a Starlink competitor potential.
Both projects have suffered long delays and have a long way to go to catch up with the Musk space giant, but it is still presumably good news for the company that its main competitor is no longer literally sleeping feet of the White House.
Finding ways to encourage competition with Musk, if you don’t release it completely, you are likely to have a priority for a Kamala Harris administration, and now it can also be one for Trump. In response to VOX questions to the White House about the future of SpaceX contracts, spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt answered in a statement sent by email: “President Trump focuses on making our great again and approveing the great bill.” Spacex did not respond to a request for comments.
He thought that the two are no longer talking, it is likely that Trump is more difficult than he thinks to get out of Elon Musk’s business completely.
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