And they have good reason to worry.
Tinker Tailor
SpaceX just launched some reportedly “next-gen” spy satellites on behalf of the US government — and it sounds like certain officials at the Pentagon are anxious about it.
In interviews with the New York Times, Pentagon officials and consultants who work with the space industry say that there are those within the Department of Defense concerned about the secretive spy crafts, especially in the wake of revelations that Elon Musk has been having cozy phone chats with Vladimir Putin.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that these Musk-Putin tête-à-têtes have been going on “regularly” since all the way back in 2022. During one such call, Putin asked the multi-hyphenate CEO not to provide Starlink satellite internet to Taiwan as a “favor” to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Given that Taiwan does indeed lack Starlink coverage, it would appear that Musk acquiesced.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has publicly voiced concern about the alleged exchanges, and he’s not the only one: officials at the DoD have apparently been worried privately that, as critics have long pointed out, the US government may have erred by putting all its eggs in Musk’s incredibly conspiratorial and far-right basket.
Monopoly Money
Three Pentagon officials interviewed by the NYT anonymously so they could speak freely said that if nothing else, there’s growing apprehension about the appearance of a SpaceX monopoly if both NASA and the DoD are using it near-exclusively for space contracts.
Indeed, in a report issued earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board warned that the “emergence of vendor lock, or dependence upon a sole vendor, has the potential to negate the strengths of the market by stifling innovation and inflating prices.”
“This can culminate in a de facto monopoly,” the report continued, “cementing a stagnant and wasteful anticompetitive paradigm.”
Mandy Vaughn, a member of that DOD board and the CEO of the space consultancy GXO, took the criticism a step further.
“There isn’t a launch or a spacecraft competition that SpaceX can’t walk into and completely warp and run the table,” Vaughn explained to the NYT. “That’s a problem.”
At the end of the day, it’s a massive issue that the person who controls so much of the US government’s space contracts has been chatting on the regular with one of our country’s biggest rivals — and now, he’s in charge of sending out new spy satellites.
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