Over the summer, as Elon Musk ramped up support for Donald Trump’s election campaign, the famously transactional former president seemed to promise the world’s richest man something in return. “We have to make life good for our smart people — and he’s as smart as you get,” Trump said at a late-July rally.
One thing Musk wants: for the Federal Aviation Administration to speed up its processing of space launch licenses, which his company SpaceX says is slowing the cadence of test flights of its massive Starship rocket. And then there’s SpaceX’s tussles with the Environmental Protection Agency over the impacts from Starship launches on a wildlife-rich area on the Gulf Coast in Texas.
Trump, who will parachute a slew of new political appointees into the FAA and EPA, could bring quick relief on both counts, and more broadly roll back rules in the heavily regulated space industry. That would help all space companies, but none more than SpaceX, said Chris Quilty, founder of the space-focused financial services firm Quilty Analytics. At industry gatherings this year, competitors expressed mounting worries that SpaceX will get preferential treatment from the Trump administration, he said. “Even if you were pro-Trump and you’re in the space industry, you’re thinking, ‘Crap, SpaceX is already killing it. Do they need any further advantage?’ ”
It’s part of the reason why the space industry is looking at the return of Trump to the White House with a mix of hope and trepidation.
Trump built a strong pro-space record in his first term. It “was arguably the most impactful presidential space effort since JFK,” said Quilty. With Vice President Mike Pence, a longtime space enthusiast, leading a revived National Space Council, the Trump administration established the Space Force as an independent military service; pushed for higher NASA funding; launched the Artemis program, which refocused the agency’s manned spaceflight efforts on a return to the moon; and orchestrated an international treaty governing exploration and mining on the moon, Mars and asteroids.
In his next term, industry players think Trump’s interest in competing with China will boost spending on military and civil space programs, ranging from defending against Chinese antisatellite weapons to keeping pace with the country’s efforts to exploit the moon. And, if Musk gets his way, the government may shift its space priorities toward his own, long-term aspiration: reaching Mars. “Elon, get those rocket ships going because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said in September.
It’s unlikely Congress would go along with that, said Quilty. Many space experts believe figuring out how to build a sustained human presence on the moon is a necessary precursor to going to Mars. Still, NASA could provide some support for SpaceX’s private effort to reach Mars. Musk has said he’s planning to send five uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026.
Any grand ambitions — for the moon or otherwise — could be counteracted if Trump convinces Congress to deliver on his campaign promises to slash taxes and government spending. Trump has said he would task Musk to lead an effort to audit the government. The billionaire has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the budget as head of what he’s dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency.
At NASA, one of the biggest cost-saving moves that could be made would also benefit SpaceX: scuppering the costly Space Launch System, the giant government-owned rocket that is the main vehicle of the Artemis program, which is slated to return American astronauts to the moon. NASA’s inspector general has estimated a single launch costs $4 billion – roughly a sixth of the agency’s annual budget. Many space exploration advocates believe that Starship would be able to do the same job for a sharply lower price – Musk claims a single launch will be under $10 million.
SpaceX is already involved in the Artemis program – it’s developing a version of Starship that would function as a lunar lander, rendezvousing with the Lockheed Martin-built Orion crew vehicle above the moon to take astronauts down to the surface. But another government contract to replace SLS with Starship would be lucrative.
That’s unlikely, even despite Musk’s new position of influence. Killing SLS, nicknamed the “Senate Launch System” for the pork the program provides, supports jobs in all 50 states (its prime contractor is Boeing) — and as with all elements of the budget, Congress is the ultimate decision-maker.
More achievable would be to start a process to transition to a commercially developed vehicle after the first three of the six planned Artemis missions, said Todd Harrison, a defense and space policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. (Artemis II, which will be a manned test flight around the moon, is scheduled for next year.) The New Glenn rocket, which is being developed by billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, could compete with Starship for the role.
Another way Musk and SpaceX stand to benefit in the Trump administration is from a transition to a GOP majority on the Federal Communications Commission. The company currently has a “deluge” of requests pending with FCC to raise the share of the spectrum used by its Starlink communications satellites and the power of their transmissions, as well as to increase the size of its constellation and place satellites at lower altitudes, notes Quilty.
Along with maintaining or increasing funding for NASA, Trump may also favor expanding the Space Force, currently the smallest of the military services with a budget of $29 billion. He said in late August that he wanted to establish a Space National Guard, an idea opposed by the Pentagon as too expensive. But it’s unclear if that will happen, given the “huge amount of uncertainty” over how Trump’s stated ambition to slash taxes and federal spending will impact the defense budget, said Harrison.
If the GOP ends up with a narrow majority in the House, it would empower the budget hawk Freedom Caucus, which has proposed constraints on the defense budget, points out Harrison. And Trump himself has been ambivalent on defense spending.
“If it’s the same budget dynamics that we’ve seen for the past few years with the Freedom Caucus insisting on spending cuts that end up falling on defense, then I think Space Force funding will continue to be constrained and we may even see additional cuts from Congress,” said Harrison. “I don’t think that there’s a lot that the Trump administration could do to counter that.”
Regardless of the overall budget, the administration is likely to turn more toward privatization in space as part of its efforts to counter China, said Jeffrey Manber, an industry veteran who’s heading an effort to build a commercial space station at the startup Voyager Space. “I think we’ll see that at NASA, we’ll see that at DOD,” he said.
That could provide new life for a host of U.S. space companies. Commercial satellite Earth observation providers have made great strides, as evinced by the stunning imagery Maxar and Planet Labs provided of the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But profitability has been elusive.
Part of the problem, analysts say, has been the hesitancy of U.S. national security agencies to reduce their reliance on government-owned systems for communications, Earth observation and tracking satellites and objects in orbit. A May report from the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board stated, “Government is wary of the commercial services’ long-term reliability, particularly during acute crisis.” Case in point: Musk’s decision to stop the Ukrainian military from using Starlink in 2022 to launch an attack on occupied Crimea. The billionaire has said he feared it would provoke a nuclear response from Russia.
Worries about the unreliability of the U.S. with Trump back in power, as well as that kind of unpredictability from Musk, is likely to cause other countries to accelerate their efforts to develop independent launch and satellite capabilities, said Manber, who meets regularly with foreign space agencies.
“Every one of them is concerned about being dependent on the U.S. for space access.”
