It's not like I didn't call Musk crazy before, but I think now he is truly, really nuts. Like, clinically insane. This isn't about the Dragon, of course, but about the whole thing. Very curious to see how it ends and if he is as untouchable as he clearly thinks he is.
Despite my antipathy to Elon, I hope he will take down a peg first a true untouchable Demented Don, who usurped legislative branch and is now eyeing judicial. USA turning autocratic is way scarier than any tehnobro megacorp.
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 $2T cuts he was talking about, this would have ultimately killed around a million or so Americans — the number may seem surprising, I pick it because this scale cannot be reached without cuts to a significant subset of medicare, medicaid, social security, and the military.
But again, you get that kind of scale disaster even if such things are done competently, and Musk/DOGE was doing all this stuff with unqualified people fresh from university and no experience is much worse… and unfortunately Trump is fine with unqualified people so long as they're sycophants or fawns.
I would argue that 2T$ cut (btw, I completely agree, it would be a disaster) is function of a government. I.e. neither Musk operation as an oligarch, not any other similar guy like Bezos or Tiel etc. can't really do that amount of damage on their own. It was only when Musk was given that power by Trump and instructed to act the way he did, then he could start doing damage. And the whole idea of doing cuts that way came probably not from Musk (or maybe he just had the same views) but from the likes of Bessent and Miran, actual Trump's advisors, planning all this chaos.
tl;dr - 2T$ disaster cuts should be attributed to Trump, along with most of the responsibility for the aftermath.
Yeah, pretty sure that they'll just nationalize SpaceX to prevent it from happening, but not gonna lie, it'd be funny to see how USA government would have to crawl back to Russia for ISS resupply.
Yes 100% agree. Just wanted to point out that this is not a normal commercial relationship.
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.
The obvious next step is to revoke FAA authorization for further Starship tests. Maybe take other steps to prevent "humanity from becoming multi-planetary" and maximally delay any future Mars missions.
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.
It was obvious from the beginning, that economical miracle of SpaceX is based on government subsidies. Without USA pumping money in every Musk project, his hi-tech businesses are dead.
SpaceX, subsidies? No. Government contracts? Yes. Tesla subsidies, also yes.
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.
