Washington has spent billions pushing for alternatives to SpaceX, but they’ve failed to deliver
Forget his wealth, said Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker. It’s the sheer power Elon Musk wields today that should shock us. The billionaire’s rocket company, SpaceX, is currently the sole means by which Nasa can get astronauts into space from US soil. Another of his ventures, Tesla, controls the nation’s biggest network of electric-vehicle charging stations.
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Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, meanwhile, is Ukraine’s main battlefield communication tool. Pentagon officials had to plead with Musk last autumn after some Ukrainian units lost access to it. Musk had earlier demanded that the US pay for Ukraine’s discounted Starlink service, and had started pushing a pro-Russia peace plan, apparently dreamed up after one-to-one talks with Vladimir Putin. The US has now struck a deal on Starlink, but Pentagon officials remain uneasy about their reliance on Musk. “We are living off his good graces,” said one. “That sucks.”
Musk’s erratic behaviour makes his level of influence all the more alarming, said Peter Csathy in The Wrap. Look at his disastrous efforts to remake X, formerly known as Twitter. Since buying the platform last year, he has alienated advertisers and users by letting hate speech flourish and by firing staffers responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure.
For now, Washington is stuck with Musk, said Tim Fernholz on Quartz. It has spent billions trying to build Boeing and Blue Origin into private alternatives to SpaceX, but they’ve failed to deliver. Musk’s firms provide good value to Nasa and the Pentagon; and he, in turn, is reliant on state funding. It was an “incredible stroke of luck” for Musk that Ukraine’s needs emerged just as Starlink was desperately searching for new markets. But this co-dependency isn’t healthy.
It needs fixing, agreed The Washington Post. Ukraine is unlikely to be the last US ally to need the sort of emergency, high-speed internet access Starlink provides. Were Beijing, say, to sever Taiwan’s undersea cables in a conflict, could Washington count on Musk, given that Tesla “depends on its ability to produce cars in China”?
Fortunately, the Pentagon has created a $1.5bn scheme to launch 72 low-orbit satellites of its own. It’s not a great number – Musk has more than 4,500. But it should ensure that “Starlink is no longer the democratic world’s only good option”. A single man must never again have such control.
