Musk Says SpaceX to Decommission Dragon Spacecraft Immediately
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm not sure which of the two is more dangerous.
While Trump has the power of a government (and has a terrifying combination of narcissism and incompetence), I believe that if Musk had actually done the $2T cuts he was talking about, this would have ultimately killed around a million or so Americans — the number may seem surprising, I pick it because this scale cannot be reached without cuts to a significant subset of medicare, medicaid, social security, and the military.
Here's the graph from 2023, take your pick on how you'd cut $2T and then consider the implications in terms of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Budget_In...
But again, you get that kind of scale disaster even if such things are done competently, and Musk/DOGE was doing all this stuff with unqualified people fresh from university and no experience is much worse… and unfortunately Trump is fine with unqualified people so long as they're sycophants or fawns.
tl;dr - 2T$ disaster cuts should be attributed to Trump, along with most of the responsibility for the aftermath.
I don't see Trump caring what happens to the ISS, up to and including uncontrolled re-entry.
Musk calls for deorbiting ISS “as soon as possible” - https://spacenews.com/musk-calls-for-deorbiting-iss-as-soon-... - February 20th, 2025
They might not do the extra stuff NASA wants anymore, but they're currently the only US option to get astronauts to space.
Starlink is Tesla all over again - projections of profitability going exponential, only to be met with reality some years later.
NASA / DOD needs SpaceX (for now) and if Musk thinks he can just stop working with / for them and continue his rocket business as usual, he's getting really delusional.
Yes, but does Trump care?
Does ULA have a reusable rocket? They could probably use some government money to develop one.
Blue Origin has New Glenn which is partly reusable but has only flown once and did not land. Also they have serious organization challenges so they are a very distant second to Spacex. In terms of reuse and also cadence.
The best thing that could happen is if Musk left Tesla and SpaceX and let them continue under adult supervision.
SpaceX has actually made space cheap enough for a lot of other stuff to make sense, but without competition the profits are as big as Musk needs for R&D for his hobby of LARPing sci-fi he clearly hasn't read deeply (in this case Red Mars; in the cases of Neuralink and the SpaceX drone ships, The Culture).
NASA does not directly subsidise launches as far as I can telk.
What NASA does do is contract launch services through competitive tenders.
SpaceX only opened this door by arguing they were cheaper, and only kept the door open by then actually delivering, unlike all the other big players in the US.
Unfortunately for everyone who likes space stuff but not Musk personally (e.g. me), SpaceX is currently a lot better than everyone else — at least, better than everyone outside China, they're harder to speak of confidently.