If President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk get their way, NASA may become a glorified contracting agency.
As Musk promises the American public “temporary hardship” as he looks to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget — the equivalent of all spending outside Social Security, Medicare and interest on the national debt — Trump’s top space advisers talk openly about funneling even more public money to Musk’s SpaceX. If actually implemented, such proposals would give Musk a de facto monopoly over America’s commercial space industry, stifle healthy competition that fuels technological innovation and demoralize an already overtaxed NASA workforce.
Never mind that SpaceX remains well behind schedule when it comes to delivering a lunar lander derived from its Starship vehicle, or that it’ll need an as-yet untried on-orbit refueling method to reach the moon.
This reality makes it ludicrous to suggest, as Trump space adviser Greg Autry has done, that NASA simply contract out a human Mars mission to SpaceX. To put it bluntly, the company has not demonstrated the technical competence required to execute even less demanding missions.
NASA remains an irreplaceable and indispensable public agency. If Trump and Musk hollow it out, however, the United States will quickly find itself without any viable space program.
