MICHAEL CAIN JR/SIPA USA VIA AP
More than half of the satellites currently circling the Earth were launched by SpaceX.
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Presidential sidekick Elon Musk has thus far been spared from the greatest risk to his interstellar empire: the continuity of hawkish antitrust enforcement between the Biden and Trump administrations. That’s good news for his company SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, which are in a plum position to dominate not only commercial space transportation, but space itself. By most accounts, Musk will soon depart government for the friendlier confines of his own private city after pulling out random wires from the federal motherboard. But if everything goes according to plan, the richest man on Earth will soon earn an even darker and stupider moniker: viceroy of low-Earth orbit.
More than half of satellites circling the Earth are currently owned by Starlink, launched into our atmosphere using SpaceX Falcon rockets, and the company is now petitioning to launch tens of thousands more. Starlink gained new eligibility from Trump’s Commerce Department to wire much of the underserved parts of the country with satellite internet. There are now Starlink satellite systems serving the White House, and Starlink contracts upgrading IT for a Federal Aviation Administration in disarray thanks to cuts by DOGE, Musk’s hand-selected government-destroying apparatus. If that wasn’t enough, Republicans could soon steer wireless spectrum auctions Starlink’s way, which could bulk up the company’s satellite capacity even further.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has raked in billions of dollars in government contracts sending satellites and astronauts into space, while also collecting millions from private entities using SpaceX rockets to further their own space enterprises. President Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year would shower further billions on SpaceX for a back-to-the-future missile defense system and manned flights to Mars and the moon.
The federal government’s reliance on SpaceX started well before the Trump administration, and for good reason. SpaceX rockets have proved efficient, reusable, and cost-effective. SpaceX enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts in 2024, the last year of the Biden administration. But critics, including those inside the Department of Defense, have sounded the alarm on the increasing dominance of a single company.
“Heaven forbid we have a mishap with a Falcon 9 launch,” Col. Richard Kniseley, an officer in the Space Force’s Commercial Space Office, told The New York Times last year. “That means it is grounded, right? And that means we could be without launch.” Kniseley’s concern is just one among many related to SpaceX dominating the full range of space services.
America’s national security is increasingly dependent on SpaceX safeguarding Americans’ secrets.
Hal Singer, a professor of economics at the University of Utah, has even more concerns. Singer’s tally of anti-competitive SpaceX actions includes corporate predation, barrier-to-entry protectionism, exclusionary contracting, and more. Meanwhile, two competitors of note—Jim Cantrell of Phantom Space and Peter Beck of Rocket Lab—have both publicly disclosed actions that SpaceX has taken to undercut their growth.
Cantrell said that two clients he was courting for his launch company balked at deals due to provisions they had already committed to in SpaceX contracts preventing them from using other firms. Beck claims that in the months after he met with Musk to discuss Rocket Lab, SpaceX rapidly moved to offer payloads at discounted prices to quash rival development.
Beck and other space CEOs have gone on record claiming that SpaceX intentionally fixed the cost of its payload service to undermine nascent competitors. “Transporter’s low price—initially $5,000 per kilogram—was below what some industry executives calculated was SpaceX’s basic cost. They concluded that SpaceX could only offer such a low price by subsiding those flights with some of its government contracting revenue,” the Times found.
At the same time that SpaceX is allegedly undercutting the price of transporting satellites into space, it is simultaneously engaged in consolidating the vertically aligned satellite communications industry through its subsidiary Starlink. If successful at cornering the market in both space transport and satellite communications, Elon Musk would effectively control space.
PERHAPS THE MOST SINISTER ASPECT of monopolization is a firm’s ability to blot out the effects of market capture through size alone, concealing the everyday effects of monopoly control by enveloping entire industries and leveling any alternative. Take Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud services firm boosted its own products on its retail website, ferreted away its sprawling, inhumane warehouses in the hinterlands of major transport hubs, and engaged in PR blitz after PR blitz to conceal the toll its services take on the workers powering its empire.
But at least Amazon is down here, on Planet Earth, where we can see its fleets driving mercilessly day and night through suburbia and the urban sprawl. (Although maybe not for long: In late April, Amazon launched its first Kuiper satellites into space, in an attempt to compete with Starlink, albeit perhaps too late to change the trajectory of the market.) By contrast, SpaceX and Starlink are largely invisible, save for the flickering of satellites that can be seen over certain latitudes for just a few minutes on clear evenings after launch.
The creeping effects of monopolies usually include the stifling of innovation, price manipulation, increased costs, and selectively provided services. But when it comes to SpaceX, national-security concerns largely absent in consumer cartels are introduced into the equation.
While the Cold War space race has been absent-mindedly memorialized in postcards of Sputnik and dioramas at the Air and Space Museum, a new, subtler competition for space dominance has increased steadily in the background of the 21st century. The U.S. Space Force was maligned at the time of its creation as one more flashy excess of Donald Trump’s imagination, but the new military branch is a very real, very active part of the armed forces, which monitors and preempts interspatial and space-to-ground attacks by American adversaries, among many other duties. Given the risks posed by privatization, the Space Force and its stupidly named Guardians’ duties are only expanding.
In testimony submitted to a U.K. parliamentary foreign affairs committee, experts Raúl González Muñoz and Marcel Plichta described the emerging vulnerabilities posed by corporate expansion into space and the risk this growth poses to national security. “The rise of ‘New Space’ makes terrorist activity easier and more deleterious to UK interests: The term New Space refers to a new mindset towards space, not a specific technology,” they wrote.
“It stems from three main developments: 1) miniaturization of satellites, 2) space privatization by companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and 3) new services based on space data. As a result, the barriers to entry in space are lowering, with non-state actors increasingly able to access LEO [low-earth orbit].”
JEANNE ACCORSINI/SIPA
Elon Musk is working with defense/tech firms to win the $10 billion Golden Dome missile defense contract.
America’s meager attempts at corporate regulation safeguard national security not only by creating physical redundancy, but also by distributing control over essential systems to more than one actor. This point is critical given recent reports about security problems that have long plagued Elon Musk’s companies. In 2024, The New York Times published an incredibly long list of failures.
According to the report, three separate reviews into SpaceX compliance with federal security protocols were opened prior to Musk’s ascension to DOGE. These included investigations by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, the Air Force, and the Pentagon Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
The Air Force denied Musk a high-level security clearance for certain programs, and insiders report that since 2021, Musk and SpaceX have failed to comply with core parts of security clearance screening. Details of Musk’s travel and meetings with foreign leaders in addition to the details of his drug use were not adequately provided to defense officials, according to the report.
Daniel Collins, a former DOD official hired by SpaceX to run the necessary security vetting, “allowed some executives who did not have the proper clearance into classified meetings” and “discouraged reporting violations of security clearances, including by Mr. Musk,” the Times found. When Cody Miller, an Army veteran working on clearances, emailed executives to warn them that the company’s “let’s push it till we are caught mentality” was not going to end well, he was summarily asked to resign.
The government’s obsessive cult of secrecy all too often works in service of keeping the public out of the business of government and occluding what the military blob is really spending our money on. But when it comes to ensuring proper security vetting in the private sector, the calculus changes, at least at SpaceX. Elon Musk, a South African by birth—who spends as much time posting about white Afrikaners as Americans—is not in the business of government, or national defense, but the business of business.
And as senators and defense officials investigating SpaceX have made clear, America’s national security is increasingly dependent on SpaceX safeguarding America’s secrets from foreign adversaries at a time when space is filling up with satellites, weapons, and spies.
IN 2024, THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE released a report on the evolution of the adversarial “gray zone,” a new sphere of technologically enabled competition that stops short of overt violence—“beyond diplomacy and in lieu of war,” according to the report.
“[D]iverse activities ranging from Iran’s targeting of US officials for assassination, to Russia’s election disinformation, and China’s militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea” all fall into this gray zone orbit. So does “[k]inetic, non-reversible, or reversible attacks on terrestrial and on-orbit space assets.”
Given that Musk’s allegiance to America seems secondary to an extraterrestrial obsession with the propagation of martians, the dangers posed by his control of outer space are grave. Space-to-space (using a satellite to strike another), Earth-to-space (using radio frequency, directed-energy weapons on the ground to destroy or degrade a satellite), Earth-to-Earth (destroying/disrupting means to communicate with the satellite), and space-to-Earth (purposefully deorbiting a satellite) attacks are all on the menu for state actors and terrorist organizations eager to see American destabilization.
And it is not as though these types of attacks have not been attempted successfully. On the low end of the spectrum are satellite hijackings: The Tamil Tiger insurgents of Sri Lanka hijacked a satellite frequency for over a year to broadcast calls for insurgency. Hamas followed the same playbook in 2012 and 2014. And in 2021, it was revealed that a German/U.S. research satellite turned itself directly toward the sun and imploded, an attack covered up at the time but later deemed to be the result of a hacking campaign on a satellite command station inside NASA.
These are just the incidents we know about. A graduate thesis from the National Intelligence University on space terrorism written by a redacted author notes that the barriers to downing a satellite from orbit, or worse, turning it into a weapon to crash into other satellites, are exceedingly low. A high-energy laser and a query of public satellite frequencies is all an enterprising terrorist might need to wreak chaos.
If that’s not worrisome enough, Musk has joined forces with an array of defense/tech firms that are allegedly on the cusp of securing a $10 billion contract to build a “Golden Dome” composed of satellites equipped with lasers strong enough to shoot missiles out of the upper atmosphere, giving him control of even more satellites, this time with weapons attached. (The Golden Dome may premiere with a subscription-based model, where Musk and his partners own the space lasers, and the Pentagon rents them.)
While the cost of defense monopolies is felt most acutely in America’s lack of universal health care, child care, and welfare benefits, the cost of allowing Elon Musk’s monopoly on outer space to continue unchecked poses an even greater existential threat: one man with the impulse control of a 20-year-old Fortnite addict controlling the entirety of our planet’s internet, communications technology, and even space itself. As Trump’s regulators hack away at Google, Facebook, and the barons of terrestrial technology, a similar undertaking should be launched into outer space.
