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.

Indeed, Trump’s executive order makes Golden Dome appear feasible. Trump insisted they could build the system in three years for only $25 billion. The vast majority of that budget would go to SpaceX, with $10 billion for them to design the satellites and more on top of that to launch all 1,000 satellites.

Seems reasonable, right? SpaceX has proven the fundamental technology and already has the launch capacity. Just piggyback off that, and hey presto!

Sadly, it isn’t that simple. A system like the Golden Dome is far, far more complex than Starlink — particularly if it is going to operate independently of human oversight to speed up its reaction time to enable hypersonic missile interception. As such, the independent Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the project will take closer to 20 years and cost $524 billion to build. Let’s also not forget that the LEO orbits used by Starlink and Golden Dome aren’t stable and decay within five years or so. In other words, you would need to rebuild the entire system every few years at enormous expense, as parts of it will regularly fall from the sky! So, the actual price tag for the system to be active for a decade or more is potentially over a trillion dollars. With a budget-crushing potential for overspending and the apparent conflict of interest, it’s no wonder the Pentagon panicked.

Again, the vast majority of these funds would have been spent on SpaceX. This really was a multi-hundred-billion-dollar, virtually guaranteed payday for SpaceX. But now that Musk and Trump have parted ways, and Trump has threatened to revoke all of SpaceX’s federal contracts (which comprise most of their business), this giant payday has landed firmly in the trash, with Trump’s team actively trying to shut him out of the deal.

However, let’s take a step back here, because the Pentagon didn’t scrap Brilliant Pebbles solely because of its cost. Back in the ’90s, it was never going to be the world-dominating hyper-weapon it promised to be, and 35 years later, the concept is even more flawed.

The same major political issues that derailed Brilliant Pebbles are also a considerable problem for Golden Dome. Placing huge interceptor missiles in orbit around the entire planet will violate numerous international treaties. It would also significantly stoke international tensions, as the Golden Dome interceptor missiles could easily be used to devastating effect on ground targets, effectively putting every inch of the planet under constant threat of US attack.

But both Brilliant Pebbles and Golden Dome are incredibly vulnerable to anti-satellite warfare. Currently, both China and Russia have in-orbit anti-satellite systems capable of destroying or deorbiting numerous satellites without firing a single missile. Russia is even developing a space-based nuke capable of creating an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) that can wipe out entire satellite constellations in one go. However, as Starlink has demonstrated, these systems are highly susceptible to hacking. Their communications can be easily jammed, and their GPS can be spoofed, effectively rendering the satellites useless. In short, Golden Dome is the ultimate glass cannon — it packs a huge existential punch but can be defeated unbelievably easily.

And it might not even need to be defeated. As shown by Iran’s retaliation against Israel, it’s not nuclear weapons that are the issue these days; it’s hypersonic missiles that fly so fast that nothing can intercept them. That was how Iran was able to blast through Israel’s Iron Dome — they overwhelmed it with smaller, slower missiles, then sent in a hypersonic missile. Numerous studies have shown that systems like Brilliant Pebbles and Golden Dome have the same weakness as the Iron Dome and likely can’t reliably defend against hypersonic missiles.

So, after spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Trump’s giant political penis extension, it can be rendered useless by basic cyberattacks, and it is useless against the biggest threat to US military dominance, the hypersonic missiles currently being deployed by Russia, China and Iran.

So, when I said SpaceX had a guaranteed payday here, that is only if Trump forces this deeply compromised project down everyone’s throats, as it will face serious pushback from every other branch of government and even the military.

There is a deep irony to Musk fumbling the bag here. The development of Brilliant Pebbles required a significantly less expensive launch vehicle than what was available. This need is what prompted NASA to develop and test the DC-X, a self-landing single-stage rocket, in the 1990s. This was the rocket that proved landing rocket boosters with retrorockets was possible, and the technology and systems it developed were ripped off by SpaceX in the 2000s to make the Falcon 9. So, SpaceX could never have existed without Brilliant Pebbles, and yet they have failed to secure the contract for its resurrection. All because Musk’s ego had to outshine Trump’s.

This failure will deeply hurt SpaceX. I have said it a million times now (read more here), but Starship development is years behind schedule, and the numerous failed missions demonstrate it is still many, many years away and potentially tens of billions of dollars worth of development away from being operational. SpaceX has already invested nearly $10 billion in Starship development; it likely can’t afford to keep developing it for much longer. Golden Dome offered the hard cash SpaceX needed to keep Starship afloat and possibly get it working (if the concept can ever work). It wasn’t just a vast, greedy payday — it was a lifeline for SpaceX, saving it from the monumental failure of Musk’s Starship. However, that is no longer the case, and now SpaceX and Starship’s future is far from certain.

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Sources: The Independent, The Independent, CNN, Science, Patrick Coffey, Donald Baucom, Will Lockett, Science CA, CATO Institute