We interrupt the scheduled programming...
(Yes, it's Elon. But there's something more important to say about what's coming next)
I was intending to publish the fourth installment of my miniseries “Artemis and the Moon” this week, but I couldn’t help myself. I have to jump in on the break-up between Elon and Donald. And no, I won’t react every time Musk is in the news, but I want to comment on the likely domino effects of this moment. They could actually be really, really big in terms of dominance in space, and they could come down in rapid succession. They could provide opportunities, if other actors are willing to take those up.
And as another excuse for interrupting the Artemis and the Moon miniseries: there are likely to be direct impacts on the U.S. Artemis programme, and therefore on who is on the Moon, when, and why.
As I’ve pointed out before, a few times, and will say many times again, space is just another domain where geopolitics are playing out. For better and for worse. In 2025, we have reached the end of the American empire, we are undoubtedly in a multi-polar era, and even U.S. allies are reconsidering their options carefully. In terms of security, trade, commercial opportunity, energy markets, investment into education and intellectual capital, technology partnerships. And therefore, in terms of who’s doing what with whom in space.
I would venture to say this political bromance break-up signifies the beginning of the end of the U.S.’s dominance in space. For better and for worse.
First, the gossip: The breakup
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would know that the media is delighting in the end of the most politically charged bromance since bromances were a thing. Delighting because it creates juicy headlines, and because there is more and more shit-slinging between these two men every few minutes on their respective social media platforms. As in, the platforms they respectively own.
The story went like this: Musk came in to U.S. federal government armed with chainsaws, a comic book name for an invented government role, and a small army of recent college graduates, to enact a gory massacre on public servants and public programmes, apparently using AI to determine which ones to cut. A poll came out that hardly anyone liked this horror movie, and Musk’s net worth plummeted, with stocks in Tesla suffering up to 70% in value as people on both sides of the American political poles (and globally) voted financially against the role he had gained without an election. So Musk stepped back from DOGE, bruised eye but ego mostly intact.
Then, as the Big, Beautiful Bill was pushed through, just a few days after receiving a big, beautiful golden key to the Whitehouse, Musk raged on Twitter/X about how bad it was, and how we should now all take up swords instead of chainsaws and follow the Tarantino flavour of gore. He wants the masses to go after anyone who voted for the bill.
And now, there are “live updates” about the spat, which you can follow hour by hour, minute by minute. (I mean really, Elon, do you think anyone is going to be surprised that DJT is in the Epstein files? This is a man who has declared bankruptcy several times, been accused of sexual harrassment and rape, as well as blackmailing some victims to keep their mouths shut, has said the most horrendous things about women and black Americans and immigrants — including that they will eat your cats and dogs — has actual neo-Nazi groups supporting him, refused to give up power peacefully, incited riots at the White House, has had impeachment attempts against him, is a convicted criminal with multiple law suits still open against him, is openly corrupt in accepting rather expensive air-ware, has threatened the sovereignty of allied nations … and is rewarded for all of this with being elected president for a second time. “Epstein files” accusations are going to slide off him like highly refined oil.)
But actually, so what?
It was inevitable that Elon and Donald would break up at some stage. It was just a matter of when and over what. Donald seems genuinely surprised. But Elon has been a rather fickle boyfriend, claiming in 2016 that Trump was unfit to run for office, and then, within minutes of someone trying to shoot Donald’s ear off in 2024, Elon endorsed him and began throwing his money and his weight behind him. Now he’s upset that he was sent away with a golden key. Or that electric vehicles will suffer under the new bill. Or something else. It doesn’t really matter what the trigger was, it was going to happen sooner or later.
The “so what” is that SpaceX stands to lose an enormous amount of cash flow from government contracts. SpaceX has at least $20 billion in NASA contracts, an undisclosed amount in U.S. military contracts (but expect a number at least comparable to the NASA dollars), and is estimated to have another $68 billion in contracts lined up, which are now under threat with this current spat. Those are all “billions” with a “b”.
And that if this spat continues along the lines of the first 24 hours, there are whole space programmes and capabilities that are going to suffer, change, be dismantled, be reinvented, and this will change the course of the U.S.’ role in space. And therefore of the political “spacescape” as a whole.
“NewSpace” or Space 2.0 is not what it’s all cracked up to be
SpaceX is often held up as the posterchild for “NewSpace”. But it’s already an anachronistic term. Commercialisation is no longer new nor disruptive; it is now a dominant factor in space technologies and economies. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that we’ve already surpassed Space 3.0 (with the rise of more political actors and governance challenges) and we’re already in Space 4.0 (with a diversity in types of actors, governance mechanisms and technological changes). This forms part of the whole “space citizen” framework.
Still, for about 20 years now the terms “NewSpace” and “Space 2.0” have been used to herald a new space age, different from the 20th century space age, in which only a few States had the technical and economic wherewithal to access space. State-owned programmes were end-to-end (satellite manufacture, rocket manufacture, launch, operations, downlink, tracking stations, data processing, policy, law, etc).
In the early 2000s, governments began conscious investment in the private sector. In the U.S., this was through explicit policies that facilitated integration of commercial providers into both NASA and Defence space programmes. In Europe and Asia (except China), there was a similar trend.
Commercial R&D led to a significant reduction in the size of satellites, which led to a decrease in the price of access to space , and therefore an increase in the number of countries that could access space, without needing an end-to-end space programme. They could purchase a satellite commercially, or purchase commercial off-the-shelf components, and procure a launch either through a partner country or a commercial provider.
The first two decades of the 21st century proved that the commercial space sector could develop technologies faster, cheaper, with a higher risk tolerance than government programmes that are dependent on public spending and social licence. The common narrative is therefore that Space 2.0 means that commercial providers now dominate space. This is true to a certain extent: globally, in the first 50 years of space activities, we went from 1 satellite in 1957 to about 960 in 2007. In the less than 20 years since then, this has increased more than tenfold: we went from 960 to over 11,500 operational satellites, with 75% of them owned by commercial providers.
About 65% of those 11,500 satellites are owned by SpaceX alone. And SpaceX is the world’s only launch provider with re-usable rockets (pretty cool, and highly necessary!), and the world’s most regular launcher. The U.S. military itself cannot launch without SpaceX. So yes, it could be a poster child…except that the rest of the commercial space sector isn’t replicating that. They tend to be technology specific (satellite manufacture OR launch OR satellite ops OR selling a service from satellites OR data processing OR tracking). But it’s true that many countries purchase space services from those commercial providers — including the largest States, even when they have their own space programmes.
However, there is a nuance that should be brought to the narrative that commercial players dominate in space. Governments remain the major customer for commercial space providers, which means the commercial sector is still dependent on spending the tax-payer's dollar. And dependent on the willingness of governments to give those contracts, and to justify that spending to the public. This will remain unchanged for quite some time.
The commercial space sector needs government (both civil and military) just as much as governments need commercial providers. And commercial actors can do nothing without domestic licencing, permits and regulatory approvals — see the examples I gave in last week’s “Artemis and the Moon Part 3”.
The Artemis programme itself includes at least 20 U.S. companies contracted to NASA to provide various aspects of the architecture, and an unknown number of foreign companies either contracted through their own national space agencies, or directly to NASA (like the Japanese company iSpace, which had a second crash landing on the Moon this week, where it had hoped to extract some lunar samples). These companies aren’t going it alone. They can’t, just as States can no longer go it alone. The lunar resource race is a public-private venture.
But again, why do we care about Elon and Donald breaking up?
After Musk brought his chainsaw into U.S. government programmes, and his close friend and fellow space entrepreneur Jared Isaacson was nominated to be the next NASA adminstrator, most of us in space policy across the world assumed this meant a full technological and economic takeover of the Artemis programme. The technical details belong in a separate piece, but basically NASA has been using 20th century SLS rocket designs with SpaceX capsules, and SpaceX wants its own rocket to be the core of the mission.
As well as SpaceX landers. And communications technologies (heard of something called Starlink?). And possibly lunar transport powered by batteries (heard of Tesla?). And intelligence (you may or may not have heard of StarShield, a classified add-on to Starlink).
Now, in the week that Elon left the White House, Jared is also suddenly out, his possible replacement a retired general (suggesting the first explicit mix of NASA’s civil space mandate with a military agenda), and Elon and Donald are throwing threats back and forth about cancelling contracts or dismantling critical services.
This is a sad story for NASA’s ambitions. No matter the outcome, science missions are going to suffer, Artemis will be set back by years, and it’s unclear whether the core focus of NASA is still the Moon or is now Mars (we all know Musk desperately wants to be the first to the red planet). When there is confusion in the mission, things slow way, way down.
Already under the “skinny budget” announced a few weeks ago, NASA’s budget is slated to be reduced to levels it hasn’t seen since before the Moon landing nearly six decades ago. I would highly encourage you to read Emma Gatti’s overview of the possible impacts of this, and a brilliant piece she co-authored with Andrea D’Ottavio on Emma’s Substack “The Space Republic”: they get right into the opportunities for Europe in the face of these massive changes. (Also, follow her Substack newsletter, you will become wiser for it.)
So what will others do in light of this? What will the next few years say about the rest of the century?
Space hegemons are bad, cooperation is good
The U.S. rhetoric for the last couple of decades has been that China and Russia both pose a serious threat in space, and more recently, that there is a possible Cold War 2.0 in space with China.
I thoroughly reject the Cold War 2.0 narrative. We are not in a bipolar era, we are in a complex multipolar one. This is rhetoric, one that has driven space budgets on both the civil and military sides, gave rise to Space Force, and is part of the justification of reviving the Reagan era “Star Wars” space defence initiative, now called “The Golden Dome”. (As you can imagine, so much to say about this….another, later newsletter post!) Meanwhile, Russia and China have interpreted all of these moves to be aggressive and threatening, and paint the U.S. as the spoiler. China calls out the U.S. on every occasion it can for being the only country in the world to describe space as a “warfighting domain”, and highlights that the U.S. refuses to take part in any treaty discussions. In space security, the U.S. is sometimes a destabilising actor.
So the end of U.S. dominance in space could have a calming, de-escalatory effect. There is an opportunity in this multi-polar reality for strong middle powers to strengthen their existing relationships — as they are already explicitly doing — and for smaller nations to build upon their regional partnerships with each other, together with middle and rising powers — which we are very much seeing in the Asia Pacific in particular — to decide how they can forge ahead in space as cooperative collectives.
Civil space partnerships, to share the costs and burden of developing more advanced satellite communications, Earth observation and position, navigation and timing (like GPS), can solve shared needs and interests. And can serve “soft power” desires: forging more secure space technology partnerships means smaller nations have more choice in who they wish to partner with, what aspects of a shared space architecture they might want as sovereign, and ensures they are indispensable if there are shifting alliances.
You might think I am just dancing on the fresh grave of U.S. leadership in space. Let me be clear: no hegemon in space is good. It doesn’t matter who it is.
Some express a fear that China might fill the vacuum. If that meant an other hegemon, that too would be bad. So how do we avoid any hegemon at all?
For Europe, Asia and India, there is no longer the same level of dependence on the U.S. for access to advanced space capabilities, or even access to the Moon. Indeed, to continue to tether oneself to the U.S. might mean falling backwards with them, and risking a new, replacement hegemon. The better path is to accelerate international partnerships, determine the values that will underpin cooperation, and expand the net as to who is involved in pushing this forward: in terms of which countries, but also in terms of genuinely integrating commercial actors into governance architecture, as well as academics, civil society, and multiple levels of society and communities.
This is the Space Citizen framework.
Why is collaboration and cooperation better than a hegemon? Not only because the Outer Space Treaty determines that space is “the province of all [hu]mankind”, not only because that treaty has instructed that space shall be accessible to all and that space activities shall benefit all. But also because we all depend on space, every single one of us around the world, in some way. Access to and management of space should not be in the hands of one dominant actor.
Our ability to respond to climate change, ensure food security, manage lands and waters sustainably, monitor maritime and air activities, ensure education and communication is accessible to those in the most remote areas, respond to natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes and floods, protect civilians during conflict, have smooth global trade and finance, manage transport for people and goods, and all the other things we are concerned about in the 21st century, all depend on access to space-based data in multiple ways.
If the space environment is at the behest of a hegemon, there are risks to each and every one of us, as inevitable great power competition extends into that environment as well.
And there are more complex risks when there is one single commercial actor that is a part of a State hegemon in space.
So, Elon and Donald, I’m sorry the bromance didn’t last. I hope there aren’t too many people who suffer directly in the break-up. But I think this is a very interesting moment for space, and I am hopeful that with enough voices and actors moving towards new forms of collaboration internationally, we might just get space governance on a good track in the very near future.
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