The Trump-Musk fight could have enormous consequences for American space programs

The Trump-Musk fight could have enormous consequences for American space programs

By Lee Billings Edited by Dean Visser

Yesterday, for several hours, an explosive degeneration of the confrontation of social media between undoubtedly the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and the most powerful president in the world, Donald Trump, rocked the space flight to us.

The couple had been Bosom Buddy allies since Trump’s fateful approval of Musk last July – an event that helped propel Trump to an electoral victory and their second presidential mandate. But on May 28, Musk announced his departure from his official role supervising the United States Doge Service. And on May 31, the White House announced that it was withdrawing the appointment of Trump from the partner near Musk, Jared Isaacman, to lead NASA. Musk suddenly attacked the Trump administration, criticizing the ONE Big Beautiful Bill budget law, now sailing through Congress, as “a disgusting abomination”.

Things got worse from there when the explosion descended deeper into threats and insults. On June 5, Trump suggested on his own social-media platform, Truth Social, that he could terminate American government contracts with Musk companies, such as Spacex and Tesla. Less than an hour later, the conflict suddenly became more personal, with Musk adopting to X, the social media platform he has, to accuse Trump – without proof – of being incriminated by government documents not yet inaugurated linked to the illegal activities of the sexual offender condemned Jeffrey Epstein.

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Musk increased the highlighting in the follow -up articles in which he approved a suggestion of indictment of Trump and, separately, said in a post now deleted due to the threat of the president, SpaceX “will immediately start the demons of his dragon spacecraft”. (Some five hours after his commentary on downgrading, Tempers had apparently cooled enough for Musk to return the remark in another post X: “OK, we do not demonstrate the dragon.”)

Dragon is a crucial workhorse of us, a human space flight. This is the main way in which NASA astronauts go to and from the International Space Station (ISS) as well as in a key element of a contract between NASA and SpaceX to securely desorbit the ISS in 2031. If Dragon should no longer be available, NASA should, near the deorbison, the ISS would essentially return to the drawing board. More broadly, NASA uses SpaceX Rockets to launch many of its scientific missions, and the company is contracted to transport astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency Artemis 3 assignment.

Trump and Musk’s Reliatory Tit For Tat also raises the disconcerting possibility of disturbing the other space parts of American space plans, many of which are considered essential to national security. Thanks to its heavy Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Rockets, the company currently provides the vast majority of space launches for the Ministry of Defense. And the SpaceX constellation of more than 7,000 Starlink communication satellites has become of vital importance for war combatants in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine allied in the United States. SpaceX is also contracted to build a massive constellation of spy satellites for DOD and is considered a leading candidate for the launch of space interceptors envisaged as part of Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense plan.

Among the avalanches of reactions to the incendiary spectacle which takes place in real time, one of the most extreme was from the former influential advisor to Trump, Steve Bannon, who called on the president to seize and nationalize SpaceX. And in an interview with the New York Times, Bannon, without evidence, accused Musk, a naturalized American citizen of being an “illegal foreigner” who “should be expelled from the country immediately”.

NASA, for its part, has tried to stay above the fray via a statement of the end of the afternoon carefully formulated by the press secretary of the space agency Bethany Stevens: “NASA will continue to run on the vision of the president for the future of space”, wrote Stevens. “We will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure that the president’s objectives in space are achieved.”

The stock market response was much less silent in its own way. SpaceX is not a listed company on the stock market. But Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, is. And he experienced a massive sale at the end of June 5 on the day of negotiation of June 5: Tesla’s course of action dropped by 14%, losing the company a huge 152 billion dollars of its market value.

Today, a relaxing telephone conversation between the two men was apparently canceled, and Trump would have said that he now intended to sell the Tesla that he had bought in March in what was a gesture of support for Musk. But there are signs that the rift can still cure: musk has not yet been expelled; SpaceX has not been closed; Tesla’s share of the Tesla actions decreases its heavy momentary losses; And it seems that NASA astronauts will not be blocked on earth or on the ISS at the moment.

Even thus, the whole sordid episode – and the possibility of new clashes between Trump and Musk take place in public – in light a fundamental vulnerability at the heart of the deep dependence of the nation at Espacex for access to space. The outsourcing of huge expanses of civil and military space programs to an innovative private company that is effectively disrupted by one person certainly has their rewards, but there is no shortage of it either.