Just off the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel’s rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. It’s 11:37 pm on a hot July night in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when our heads all swivel in the same direction. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume glowing bright, about 12 miles due north up the Banana River. The “Iron Man” riff starts to blast.
It’s fun for the couple dozen of us there. When we hear the thud of the sonic boom, most everyone lets out some kind of hoot. But for Elon Musk, it’s just another Tuesday. This is SpaceX’s 95th launch of the year, one nearly every other day. That’s more liftoffs than the rest of the world gets into space, combined.
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On this particular night, this Falcon 9 took 28 Starlink internet satellites to orbit. Starlink, of course, is another Musk space venture that dominates its competitors. His constellation has more than 8,000 satellites; its closest competitor, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, has about 630 satellites, each supplying less than 1/10th the bandwidth of a Starlink. Amazon is going all in on its own service, called Project Kuiper and led by SpaceX’s former satellite chief. The terms of Kuiper’s license from the feds require it to get 1,600 satellites into orbit by the middle of next year. So far, the Amazon constellation has 102.
It’s hard to quantify, even with those numbers, the geopolitical power that Musk now commands by way of his two space businesses. When Starlink went down for a couple of hours in late July, troops on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict had trouble connecting with their drones—and one another. “Everyone thought it was purely on the front lines, until reports started coming in that he had fallen all over the world,” one officer stationed near the city of Kupiansk, along the Oskil River in eastern Ukraine, texts me. That’s how central Musk is to modern warfare. Two days after the launch I watched from the hotel roof, another Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral, this one carrying four astronauts aboard a Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Dragon is currently America’s only way to get humans into space, as Musk reminded his onetime ally Donald Trump when the president threatened Musk’s government contracts.
Now, Musk has a chance to leverage his two dominant positions into a third. For the first time in decades, America is openly working on the weaponization of space, in response to what the Pentagon claims are threats from Russia and China. The Pentagon is investing in spacecraft that can fly up to other countries’ satellites and attack. Separately, the president has pledged $175 billion for a program that could eventually entail hundreds and hundreds of orbiting interceptors and even more communications satellites to allow them to work together.
It’s hard to quantify, even with those numbers, the geopolitical power that Musk now commands by way of his two space businesses.
Musk’s companies are unlikely to build the weapons themselves. But getting them into space, and getting them to talk to one another, that is most certainly in their wheelhouse. So while Musk may not have open access to the Oval Office like he used to, there’s no conceivable way such a buildup won’t benefit SpaceX. The open question is, by how much? When the orbiting rifles are handed out, how many gun lockers will Elon have the keys to?
You might be a little numb at this point to the degree of control that billionaires have over our lives. But you’ve watched Elon Musk stomp and smash and rage his way through politics and policy, even as his companies continue to pull off engineering feats that were once the stuff of sci-fi. So you get what’s at stake if he’s given an outsize role in the weaponization of space. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)
“The US government depends upon him very heavily,” Victoria Samson, the chief of space security at the Secure World Foundation, tells me. “So even before the election, I had been asking US space officials: ‘You have yoked yourself to a very mercurial personality. Doesn’t that concern you?’”
I. ROCKETS
As recently as the early 2010s, getting to space was expensive and slow. The United States attempted fewer than 20 launches per year. Rockets can cost $10,000 per kilogram or more. Musk and now-legendary rocket engineer Tom Mueller broke through, in part, by being scrappy: They’d swap NASA’s $1,500 latches for ones made for bathroom stalls that cost just $30, and they’d use commercial air conditioners for the Falcon 9’s payload bay rather than buy a cooling system for an estimated $3 million.
While Musk likes to keep up an antiestablishment image, he very much played the Washington game. He drew on his alliances with like-minded people in the government, such as then NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who advocated for cheaper, easier access to space—especially to low Earth orbit, which starts around 100 miles up. When Musk felt others didn’t share that vision, he sued, like the time he alleged that the Air Force had acted illegally when it gave the era’s space monopolist, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin called United Launch Alliance, an $11 billion contract for 36 rocket cores.