Elon Musk Pretty Much Has a Monopoly on Space. We Have Obama to Thank.

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In the 1950s, when the Soviets started to launch satellites into space, it caught the United States by surprise. The U.S. had to make a decision about the future of its space program. Would it try to compete with the Soviets just as an expression of the military, or would it launch a civilian program? The Eisenhower administration decided that it would launch a civilian space agency: NASA.

When John F. Kennedy came into office, he was not very interested in the agency. But the Soviets successfully sent the first person into space when Yuri Gagarin completed an orbit of Earth. The same month, the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. Kennedy decided almost spontaneously that he was going to take the most ambitious plan on the NASA shelf and implement it: putting someone on the moon in 10 years. This initiative successfully captured the public imagination and demonstrated what the government can do when it has the resources.

But after the Nixon administration takes over, it green-lights a fraction of the agency’s “wish list.” And in this new era, NASA makes a series of choices in which, rather than keeping that expertise in-house, it ends up ceding all of this power to contractors.

“They crafted a bargain with the contractors, letting them own some of the underlying intellectual property,” Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer said. “NASA’s engineers started to get further and further away from the actual development of the rockets and the parts and the systems themselves.”

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Foer about how the history of NASA and its reliance on contractors paved the way for Elon Musk’s space monopoly. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Tell me about Elon Musk. How does he enter the picture as a contractor with NASA? 

Franklin Foer: Musk gets deposed from PayPal. He’s looking to figure out his next new thing, and he’d always read science fiction. He was always interested in space, but the way he tells the story, there’s a moment where he’s coming back from a party in Long Island and he’s talking to a friend about what he wants to do next, and he says, “I really want to do something in space.” And he goes to his hotel, and he logs on to the NASA website, and he’s shocked at how the agency doesn’t have plans to go to Mars. So he gets a warehouse in suburban Los Angeles and literally just starts to build rockets.

How quickly is he selling rockets to NASA?

He benefits from incredible timing because NASA, in the early 2000s, is beginning to start to think about phasing out the space shuttle. But it still needs a system to transport astronauts and cargo back and forth to the International Space Station. It’s desperate. Almost off the bat, before he’s done very much of anything, he starts to get grants from the Pentagon, then starts to get contracts from NASA, when he hasn’t even actually launched a rocket yet.

But even so, there was a moment when SpaceX was kind of on the brink and didn’t look as if it would survive. What changed Musk’s fortunes? 

During the Obama administration, Musk is really having a hard time successfully launching rockets. He’s burning through huge amounts of cash. But it’s at this moment that the administration decides that, rather than rely on the traditional defense contractors, it’s going to try to find a way to tap into this emerging space capitalism. The Obama administration ends up giving Musk a really big contract to be that provider.

We really should underline the irony of the fact that Musk was brought in earlier this year to slash government spending and fire government workers, but his ventures have been so dependent on the federal government.

In my piece on NASA, I describe this as being kind of a story out of science fiction. In every story about technology, the monster, robot, or whatever ends up spinning out of control and consuming the inventor and the people who created it. That’s kind of what’s happened with Musk. Having these contracts helped make him a very rich and powerful man. He turns around and uses that wealth and power in order to eviscerate the very thing that helped create him.

Let’s talk about where things are now. Last year, 95 percent of rockets launched in the U.S. came from SpaceX. But the company is also about satellites and telecommunications. It sounds as if Musk is really in this catbird seat. What does that mean for NASA? 

We have somebody who’s emerged essentially as a monopolist in a field that is essential to the security of the United States. And that type of dependence is totally dangerous over the long run.

It seems as if space is incredibly important to controlling the future. 

Because of the way in which warfare has changed and the way in which communications have changed, global communications increasingly will run through space. It already does run through space for the most part, but that’s the way it’s all going to run. If we ever fought a war with China, it would involve a fight for domination of space. There’s no question that its centrality to power has only increased in this century.

It does feel as if we’re beginning to see some pushback, but it’s not especially strong. For instance, last September, Senate Democrats were arguing that reliance on SpaceX posed grave national security risks. That just seems fair. There’s also the fact that Musk has a tenuous relationship with Donald Trump, now the president, and that may put his relationship with the U.S. government in some kind of danger. Musk personally selected the person he wanted to head up NASA, Jared Isaacman, and that guy was very publicly not given the job by Trump in the end. Can you explain what happened there and how you see that influencing Musk in his relationship with the federal government?

Isaacman ran a startup, made a lot of money, had a deep interest in space, bought himself a seat on a SpaceX rocket as a space tourist, and ended up, through his holding company, investing in SpaceX. It’s hard to argue that he wasn’t beholden in some way, shape, or form to Musk. I think he’s a smart guy and had a lot of interesting ideas. But when Musk and Trump begin to fall out, Trump decides that he’s going to try to hurt Musk in the place that he knows will hurt the most, which is that he announces that he is going to withdraw Isaacman’s nomination to be NASA administrator. Musk kind of takes it as the worst thing that Trump could have done to him and begins to really vent in heated ways against Trump on X.

This is the first time Musk talked about Trump being in the Epstein files, right? 

Exactly, which brings us to this moment in politics where we’re at right now: Musk talking about creating a third party, Trump talking about maybe deporting Musk, who was born in South Africa. And it’s crazy to me that with all of this back-and-forth and with Trump being Trump and his desire to really inflict damage, that even despite all of that, the government doesn’t have recourse. Trump actually can’t take revenge on Musk because the cost for the United States would be too high.

Just because there’s no ready replacement for what he does? 

Exactly.

Trump has threatened to cancel SpaceX’s contracts. What would happen if that actually went forward?

The General Services Administration looked at this and determined that it couldn’t do it because Musk’s satellites are central to the military’s ability to communicate. Also, you’d have astronauts who would be stranded in the space station. Musk provides actual services to the government that are essential, and there’s no place else to turn to fulfill them.

Trump is said to be looking for a SpaceX competitor. Sen. Ted Cruz put a provision into the One Big Beautiful Bill setting aside $4 billion for Boeing’s space launch system. Is that something that could move forward? 

There is this other rocket that NASA is developing, but it’s just not going to have the versatility that Musk has with the Falcon 9. Nobody is developing a rocket to rival Starship, which is the vessel that ultimately will be able to make its way to Mars. It’s not clear that Musk is going to be able to build that, because the engineering challenges are so steep, but he’s getting close.

Reading your writing about Musk and NASA, I really can’t tell how you feel about it. You write that NASA is in a diminished state and express frustration that the shuttle program ran these incredibly repetitive missions to the space station, but you also note that the agency displays extraordinary acumen in science and confronts the greatest mysteries of the universe. So which is it? 

I’ve always been very attracted to the Carl Sagan view of the cosmos. For Sagan, science was an enlightenment project. It was a way of helping understand ourselves and our place in the universe. And to me, the fact that the government and NASA are engaged in those projects feels profound and important and a public good and something that the private sector is never going to be able to replicate. I look at the broader Trump war on expertise, on science, and on the production of knowledge. I see NASA’s vulnerability as being both representative and just a tragic casualty of this assault. Culturally, we’ve drifted to a point where, unfortunately, the public doesn’t care enough that we have these extraordinary resources doing things on behalf of “all mankind,” as was NASA’s slogan.

But we love watching people rocket into space. 

Yeah. There’s this very primitive part of our brain that likes powerful rockets in the same sort of way we like muscle cars. And that to me is very hollow. That’s just an empty fetishization of something that’s not even that sophisticated of an engineering problem.

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