Holy Shit: Musk might kill SpaceX too!

When Musk woke up on Thursday, did he realize that he was going to auto da fe in grand form?

I swore I would not post more than once a day¹, but then something so fucking delish hits my inbox, and I am just JAZZED.

I am in San Diego, last week was spent in leadership meetings, and I got way behind on my voracious news consumption, so much so that I missed the lover’s tiff between Trump and Musk (except for the $35 drop in TSLA stock).

Next week I am still in San Diego for a conference, and I am lounging at my hotel, and I see this BANGER of a headline: “NASA, Pentagon push for SpaceX alternatives amid Trump’s feud with Musk” (gifted link)

Over Friday and this morning, I had read many people saying that although Trump wants to strike back at Musk, the fact that Musk has our space launch capacity in his grubby mitts that there’s no way the feds would dare clap-back.

But, if there’s one thing that Trump is, it is a petty vindictive beyotch. And his off-the-cuff comment on how to save billions by cutting off government contracts and subsidies to Elon Musk could have just been a moment of pique.

And perhaps Trump would have lost interest.

But, clearly the military, NASA and other agencies that rely on Musk’s empire of businesses that suckle at the teat of Uncle Sam are now terrified enough to begin dialog with the other contractors who could challenge Musk and SpaceX.

Part of the problem with Blue Origin and others isn’t the technology so much, but the anti-competitive behaviors of SpaceX, and the arrogance of Musk in icing out any potential competitors.

The threat to decommission the Dragon capsule, our only vehicle to resupply the ISS and transport astronauts was the “oh fuck!” moment.

Government officials were especially stunned after Musk responded to Trump with a salvo of his own: SpaceX would stop flying its Dragon spacecraft, a move that would leave the space agency with no way to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station.

Musk later recanted his threat. But it alarmed officials at NASA, which entrusts SpaceX with the lives of its astronauts, and at the Pentagon, which relies heavily on the company to launch its most sensitive satellites.

That got the lazy administrators at NASA and the Pentagon kicked into high gear. They clearly realize that the sole source vendor model they have instituted with SpaceX is not healthy (no fucking shit Sherlock)

One NASA official said that watching the feud between Trump and Musk play out on social media Thursday at first was “entertaining.” But once Musk called for decommissioning Dragon, “it turned really terrifying.”

There was a similar reaction in the Pentagon, where a person said staff officers “looked at each other and said, ‘oh, it’s not funny anymore.’ There was a realization that we’re not watching TV. This is a real issue.”

Like the rest of us, they were entertained, but the ketamine addled toddler soon went far over his skis, and that opened the floodgates of terror in the military and space agencies.

Of course, Musk has defied propriety and decorum. His public drug use (smoking a joint on the JRE podcast, and his admitted use of ketamine) should have gotten his security clearances yanked faster than a 13 year old boy in the 1970’s spanked it to a Hustler he swiped from his father’s stash.

But at the time, Musk and SpaceX were the only game in town, and he held the cards.

But wait, there’s more.

Boeing’s capsule that failed tests tarnishing the aerospace giant’s image is now being revisited. In fact the congress critters aer awakening from their slumber to figure out how to eliminate the dependency on the now 100% unreliable Musk:

Musk’s declaration also rattled staffers on Capitol Hill. A key congressional committee asked about the status of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule vehicle, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry. NASA intends to use Starliner to fly crews to the space station along with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. The spacecraft is years behind schedule, however, and during its first human spaceflight mission to the ISS last summer, it ran into so many problems that NASA decided it was unsafe to return to the crew with Boeing.

I am gonna guess that there will be some funds tossed their (Boeing’s) way to patch this gap.

So, in an afternoon, Musk torched his right wing cred, incinerated his base of support, got Steve Bannon advocating him being deported, been BBQ’d by Trump (and to be perfectly honest, Trump — as much as it pains me to type this — played the battle perfectly), and potentially got a ton of oversight and attention on the safety of his cars just as he wants to launch the Robotaxi service in Texas, and also possibly destroyed the long term value of his crown jewel, the one thing that people admired most about Musk, his rocket technology.

Even though he later recanted, Musk’s threat to curtail NASA’s use of Dragon could be damaging to a company that has been one of the government’s most trusted partners, said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s almost like an embargo of the space station,” he said. “Musk was saying he is going to cut NASA off from its own laboratory in space.”

When you lose the AEI, well, you are well and truly FUCKED.

One has to assume that the ill-advised replacement of Verizon to link the ATC system with Starlink is now dust in the wind.

Let’s get some funding to the other players in space and take back control of the top of the gravity well.

Fuck an A, this is just DELIGHTFUL!

The final pull:

Still, some had warned about Musk’s foray into politics and the consequences for his companies. In an interview last year, Peter Beck, the CEO of RocketLab, which is seeking to compete for national security launch contracts, predicted that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, and time at Trump’s side could end up hurting his businesses.

“It certainly makes people uncomfortable,” he said at the time. “At the end of the day, if you’re delivering important national security missions, the buck stops with the CEO.”

1. Turns out that posting more than once a day pisses off subscribers, and punishes you in the algos, especially if you are a non-monetized ‘stack