Musk Lost SpaceX A $100 Billion+ Payday.

Talk about fumbling the bag.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Just as everyone saw coming, the Musk-Trump bromance ended spectacularly. As always with messy break-ups, there are no winners, just losers. However, it seems Musk is the biggest loser here by far. For one, polls indicate that MAGA voters are mostly backing Trump, not him. That must keep Musk’s manic, insecure ego up at night. If Musk could have just grinned and bore it and kept it together for the kids, SpaceX would have received one of the largest government contracts of all time! But, unfortunately, he blew it, and the consequences for SpaceX and Musk will be dire.

This all starts with the Golden Dome.

If that sounds like a name only the most vulgar and unoriginal mind on the planet would come up with, you’d be right. Trump took a failed Reagan space-based missile defence project known as ‘Star Wars’ and copied it word for word. He then called it the ‘Golden Dome’ because it will be bigger and better than the current ‘Iron Dome’ missile defence system. Stealing someone else’s ideas and using terrible branding? You can tell Musk rubbed off on Trump.

Trump signed an executive order on January 27 to build this system, and the Pentagon panicked. Why? Because it is totally unfeasible.

The Golden Dome is meant to be a 1,000-strong satellite constellation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that encompasses the entire planet. These satellites will act as sensors to detect and track missiles, but they will also be equipped with “interceptor” weapons to destroy said missiles before they reach their target. In theory, this would enable the US to neutralise a missile launch from anywhere on Earth at any time.

This is identical to ’Brilliant Pebbles’, the winning proposal by the father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, for Reagan’s 1988 Star Wars initiative. After two years of conceptual development, a massively pared-back version of Brilliant Pebbles was estimated to cost $50 billion in 1990 — or $123 billion in today’s money — to build, with additional expensive maintenance costs! This insanely high price for a neutered version of the system, combined with the fall of the Soviet Union, rendered the project totally unfeasible, and the Pentagon scrapped it.

Project 2025, being the Bond villain fascist document it is, wanted to revive this mega-project. It claims that SpaceX and Starlink are now capable of making such a system viable, given that launch prices are reduced and satellite constellation technology is already proven.