Elon Musk is Remaking the US Space Program w/ Tim Fernholz

0:00 Jeff Bezos is building a moon lander that might fly as soon as this year. And if that would be ready, that could be used. And there's some people in Washington who see the possibility of Jeff Bezos gets the moon and Elon Musk gets Mars as a way to sort of square the circle here.

0:40 Tim is a senior reporter at Payload Space and the author of Rocket Billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and The New Space Race. Since Elon Musk embraced Donald Trump and took on the head of Doge, there have been many aspects of that story that we have been following that people have been discussing, but maybe one of the ones that hasn't received the attention it deserves is what this means for space policy in the United States, but also for NASA as an agency itself.

1:05 It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to hear that Elon Musk is very invested in what the future of the American space program is going to look like because it also shapes what his company is going to do and whether it is going to profit from the direction that NASA and the space program go in the coming years.

1:22 And obviously, Elon Musk has very specific ideas about how that should work and about what priorities the United States should be setting for the future of its space program. So in this episode, I wanted to talk to Tim about what he has been seeing in the influence Elon Musk has been having on what the Trump administration has been doing with NASA, especially as the initial budget suggests there are going to be huge cuts to NASA programs in the coming years if the Trump administration gets its way.

1:48 So if Elon Musk cares so much about space, about learning about space and about going to space, why is something like this being pushed in this moment? And how are changes to NASA potentially going to impact Elon Musk and his company? But there's another piece of this conversation I wanted to get to with Tim as well, and that is, you know, how SpaceX is actually faring at the moment, because there are a number of stories that suggest it might be facing some headwinds.

2:12 We've already seen the public pushback to Tesla and what that has meant for sales numbers, so I wanted to know from Tim if SpaceX is experiencing something similar, you know, given that its customers are very different, and also whether the bets SpaceX has made on future rockets and future launch vehicles are really paying off as we see the number of Starship explosions continue to increase.

2:33 So that's just to say I think this is a fascinating conversation that covers many different aspects of space policy under the Trump administration and what Elon Musk is doing to try to shape it in his favor. I certainly don't want to see funding for space shut down, but I also don't think Elon Musk's priorities for the space program are one that are reflective of what many people feel NASA should be doing.

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3:13 You can join supporters like Rachel from Brooklyn, Farooza from Montreal, Josh from Portland, and Phil from Redwood City, California by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Tim, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

3:28 Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, really excited to chat with you. I have been wanting to have someone on the show for a while to talk about, you know, what the Trump administration and Elon Musk's relationship to it is going to mean for space, right? Because, you know, certainly we hear a lot about SpaceX, but I think that for a lot of us, you know, we we kind of look to the stars or, you know, we hear stories about rocket ships and going to space and men on the moon and all that kind of stuff.

3:50 And it just feels like aspirational, right? I think that there's a general interest in these kinds of topics. And, you know, the actual details of how that actually happens can sometimes fall to the wayside. But the Trump administration could potentially have a really big impact here. And so I wanted just to start with more of a general question, and then we'll dig into some of the details.

4:08 You know, in your opinion, what does the Trump administration want to do in space? You know, do they have a really particular space policy or ambitions there? How would you think about that?

4:18 Uh so the way I would think about it, and it's an important question, and you're absolutely right, that what the Trump administration is doing right now is going to have major knock-on effects in the space world, the private sector, everything. Uh, but I think it's actually important to contrast what happened uh in the first Trump administration.

4:36 Because when Trump was first elected in 2017, obviously everybody was kind of surprised. Nobody really knew what his space policy would be other than sort of like traditional Republican space concerns, which are getting rid of climate change research programs and like aggressive human exploration in space, I would say are the two sort of Republican touchstones in recent years.

4:57 So would you say that Republicans tend to be much more interested in that kind of human spaceflight side of things than the scientific aspect generally?

5:05 I think that is a fair stereotype, maybe, or like a fair like bias that is had among Republican policymakers. Uh, they certainly don't dislike science, and a lot of what the humans are exploring to do is science, but it is sort of a more of a flags and nationalistic framing of what space can be. And so in 2017, when Trump came in, that was sort of what everyone expected, and he actually nominated this former Tea Party Republican congressman uh named Jim Bryenstein to be the NASA administrator.

5:37 And there was like a big fight about in his nomination about comments that he made about uh LGBT people when he was a congressman, comments about climate change. He kind of walked everything back. Bill Nye came out and endorsed him, he became the NASA administrator. And then weirdly, space policy in the first Trump administration was largely bipartisan, pretty effective.

6:02 They didn't cancel a lot of climate stuff. They created a moon exploration program called Artemis that was gonna put the first woman on the moon, was literally the Mike Pence of all people saying this. And NASA budgets went up, and it was kind of like, whoa, it maybe the most dynamic time in public spectrum in decades.

6:26 And so fast forward to when Trump was elected again, and it was like, okay, well, one of the things that happened last time was a lot of emphasis on space, a lot of investment, and a lot of new exploration. Will we get the same thing this time? And the answer so far has been no, it's been dramatically different.

6:47 And I think that's really interesting. And so when Trump came in this time, the main promise, as it was last time, was more emphasis on commercial and private sector participation in the US space program, which is not unusual. That's been a bipartisan thing for the last couple decades. But that was kind of it.

7:09 And even that has been, I would argue, suffering in the last couple months. And there was a sort of uncertainty for a while, but now we're seeing big trade organizations, business groups, saying, actually, this space policy is really confusing. And a lot of that obviously has to do with Elon Musk's role in this administration.

7:27 So that's sort of my opening spiel.

7:30 Yeah, no, and I think it gives us a good insight, right? I I want to go back to that first Trump administration for just a second, right? Because I feel like, you know, for me, certainly I pay attention to this stuff. I wouldn't be as deep in the weeds as you are. I feel like some of the key milestones that come out of the first Trump administration is, as you say, you know, the Artemis program, this idea that humans are going to return to the moon after all of this time.

7:50 I feel like, and maybe you can correct me on this, part of that was motivated by seeing the Chinese want to, you know, do something similar there, and America feeling, you know, it needs to show it can still do this after not having been to the moon in so long, or having humans on the moon in particular.

8:04 But then also was the creation of the Space Force, you know, this kind of branch of the military that is focused on space. And also, of course, the renewal of launches of American astronauts from American soil, once again, using SpaceX rockets instead of having to go to Russia. Would they be kind of some of the main points there, or am I missing anything?

8:27 Or have I explained any of them improperly?

8:29 Uh, not really. Here's so one, definitely China is a huge motivating factor for everything we do in space. Chinese technology and capabilities are getting up to par with the US, maybe even better. And China does have a very uh serious moon program, and they want to put astronauts on the moon by 2030.

8:49 And you're right that that is why Artemis is happening in large part, and that also played a big role in the creation of the US Space Force. I would say the one thing to keep in mind about anything that happens in space is there's usually like a 10-year trail behind it. So even though the US Space Force happened under Trump's administration, it had been discussed in a bipartisan way for a long time just because of what the military saw happening in space.

9:15 Uh, and maybe it took a hawkish Republican administration to actually make that decision, and it certainly helped that Trump likes big rockets. But it's not a crazy thing to create the U.S. Space Force, is what I would say. And then when it comes to flying astronauts again on U.S. rockets, that was a huge deal.

9:33 But that was the culmination of decisions that started under George W. Bush's presidency in 2008, and were supported by the Obama administration and then the Trump administration. And it was this sort of big rah-rah moment because we were dependent on Russia to send astronauts to the International Space Station.

9:49 SpaceX and NASA collaborated to build the Falcon 9 rocket, the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and now we can send people again, and it's the cheapest spacecraft ever built. When that happened in maybe 2020, 2021, I would say that was like the golden high point of like NASA and SpaceX working together. And now we're starting to see SpaceX acting like NASA is holding them back.

10:16 And that has played out in a lot of these sort of policy changes I think we're seeing in the current administration.

10:22 Yeah, I think that puts it really into context for us, right? And it's always important to understand that sure, sure, Americans kind of going back to space on American rockets happens during the Trump administration, but there's a huge lead up to that moment, and it just happens to be that he is the president at the time that it's finally ready to go, right?

10:39 It's not that he really started it all happening or anything. But, you know, you were talking about that relationship between SpaceX and NASA. And obviously, everyone knows Elon Musk is, you know, a kind of unavoidable feature of the second Trump administration, his leadership of Doge. He is obviously someone who is very invested in space policy and has particular ideas around what the space program should look like and what should be prioritized.

11:01 Is Elon Musk's closeness to Trump, you know, changing the administration's approach to space in any notable ways?

11:08 I think so. Right now, just talking about, let's say, NASA, there are three sort of things happening that I see that are affecting NASA. And so we saw the top-line numbers for the president's budget for NASA last week. And it was the smallest request, like reduction basically ever. It was stunning how much they wanted to cut the budget.

11:32 And that's coming from three places, some of which involve Musk, some of which doesn't. But one is, and we're seeing it across government, this effort to purge DEI and climate and equity related studies. So the Planetary Society has a spreadsheet you can see where they've tracked all the grants canceled at NASA by Doge or from other sources, and it's climate research DEI.

11:56 That's a hundred million dollars or more of activity canceled. So that's one thing that's happening.

12:01 And which, as you say, is a big change from the first Trump administration where they were explicitly promoting the fact that they were gonna have the first woman on the moon. I believe as part of this mission, there's a the first black man who's gonna be going to the moon as well. Is that right? Or that was a that was a Biden innovation.

12:16 Oh, okay.

12:16 That was a change. First woman and first person of color.

12:20 But now we're at a point where NASA is like not just you know potentially changing those things, but we've even seen them kind of removing, am I right, women and people of color from their website and kind of the histories that they promote as part of this larger DEI purge, right?

12:32 Yeah, so uh NASA has sort of a rich history of outreach to students really across the United States to inspire them to care about and study STEM topics. And one way they do this is highlight the contributions of African Americans or women or all kinds of different groups who are maybe you don't picture in your head immediately when you think of an astronaut or you picture like the Apollo control room of 50 white dudes in you know short-sleeved shirts.

13:00 But we've seen it, people having stuff just cut from the website. And the staff at NASA notices this. You talk to people at NASA, and this is an agency that every single year gets an award, you know, they do a survey of the best places to work, and NASA always wins because people go there because they care about this stuff, and they're gung-ho about space.

13:23 And I don't know, it's it's not the dollars and cents side of it, but it is having an effect on morale, and it's a big change under this administration. And obviously, I think it's hard to separate out Elon Musk's dislike of DAI from the Trump administration writ large, but it's it's all of a piece. So that's one major cultural change at NASA.

13:44 Uh, another thing happening at NASA right now is the Office of Management and Budget in the White House uh is setting a lot of spending priorities right now. And the head of the OMB, Russ Vaught, does not really like NASA and has over the course of his career pushed to cut spending there. And so that's one reason why this budget came out with such dramatic cuts, is there's no one in the White House advocating for NASA, as far as I can tell.

14:12 You know, and I talked to you know lobbyists, I talk to people of these companies, I talk to people of the agencies, government employees. There's nobody in the White House carrying that flag and saying, actually, NASA science is important. It used to be under the first Trump administration, there was an organization called the National Space Council.

14:31 There was a guy named Scott Pace, who was the executive director of that, who was a longtime space policy guy, and he would be the guy in the room and say, actually, we we would need these things to have a successful space program. There's nobody like that there now. Uh, one bit of news that has just come out is it seems like they're going to recreate the National Space Council.

14:48 Uh, when the administration came into office, Elon Musk and SpaceX were lobbying against it. I think it was they saw it as like an alternative power center to their own. Uh, and so there's preminology going on right now. People are wondering if Elon's special government employee status expires and he does reduce his role in the administration, maybe that creates a vacuum where the traditional space establishment can have more power again.

15:12 But we just don't know. But but that is a source of pressure to cut NASA funding right now, is the OMB. But then, like the juicy stuff that we all really want to talk about is are there things that are happening in NASA where we can say, oh, this looks like Elon Musk's hands or this looks like SpaceX interests?

15:29 And I think we can see that. Uh, there was a Wall Street Journal story that folks should read uh a couple months ago that talked about how Musk was pushing for more focus on Mars at NASA, which is his big thing forever and ever and ever. And we're starting to see that kind of confirmed in policy documents coming out.

15:48 So we are seeing, for instance, a de-emphasizing of going to the moon, which again, remember, this was the Trump administration's signature idea, you know, eight years ago, six years ago. Now we're talking about Mars, and that's really what SpaceX wants to do. But I think what's what is particularly interesting about this is not just the fight over destinations, like where the best place in space to go is, but it's also about timing.

16:18 Because right now, the US moon landing depends basically on SpaceX's rocket starship. This is what they're building right now, it keeps blowing up over the Gulf of Mexico. But it is what NASA has chosen to land those astronauts on the moon, which we are supposed to do in 2028-ish. However, I don't talk to many people who think that timing is reasonable, mainly because they don't think Starship will be ready to land people on the moon by then.

16:47 And so we're seeing them switch away from the moon and towards Mars. There's going to be a billion dollars, according to the White House, in new Mars spending at NASA, even as they cut everything else. And they're switching Mars sample return, which was a way over budget, way overdue plan to use robots to bring back samples from Mars to having astronauts do it, presumably with Starship.

17:16 And so one way to look at it that maybe is cynical, but I think I think has some credence is that SpaceX knows that they're not going to be able to get to the moon on time. So if they have a new deadline for the Mars that's four or five years further out, that's four or five years more of government development funding to get ready for Mars.

17:37 And so what we're seeing is the space agency shift its priorities in a way that benefits SpaceX, probably at the expense of SpaceX's competitors and certainly at the expense of what used to be the national priority four months ago. So it's it's very interesting to see how these things are turning now.

17:55 Yeah, it's a fascinating development, right? And I've been reading the same things that you're talking about, right? That it does seem at least in part being motivated by, sure, I'm sure Elon Musk wants to go to Mars and all these sorts of things, but also because they probably don't want to have to admit that what they're supposed to be developing for the Artemis Moon mission is not actually going to be ready on time and would cause it to be delayed.

18:18 So if the project and the focus shifts to Mars instead and the moon mission doesn't happen, then they don't need to say, oh, we weren't able to deliver on the timeline that was expected because now priorities have shifted and that's like out the window. Does that sound right?

18:32 I think that's a that's a reasonable interpretation. Until, and again, this is just based on this top-line NASA budget that has very little information. And the other wrinkle here is Congress doesn't like this budget, even the Republicans. If you watched the hearings with Trump's nominee to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, is the most important senator for space right now.

18:57 He's in charge of the committee that sort of oversees NASA's activities. And because he's from Texas and a lot of the moon stuff takes place in Houston, he wants to go to the moon. And he has Isaacman up there saying, Yes, sir, we're going to go to the moon. And then NASA comes out with this budget that's like, eh, I don't think that we are.

19:14 And so traditionally, in general, the president often tries to like cut NASA's budget or reduce it or realign priorities. And typically Congress says no. And for a long time, this was kind of a bad thing. The other context for all of this moon stuff is the moon technology, the rocket that we built to go there, the spacecraft that will carry the astronauts, built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

19:40 Very over budget, very expensive, very delayed, classic Washington space industrial complex problems. And so for a long time, it sort of seemed like SpaceX would save us from this, or new paradigms of contracting would bring more discipline to these contractors. And there was a chunk of time there where if you were trying to make the case that we should be more efficient in our space spending, we should go with SpaceX instead of these traditional military contractors.

20:11 And now we're seeing kind of the reverse where once Elon was sort of railing against political influence, and now he's in the White House sort of setting priorities.

20:21 There are a bunch of things there that I that I want to pick up on, right? So let me say I'll come back to Isaac Man and Starship in just a little bit. But I want to ask you a bit more about the moon program and this potential shift to Mars first. So if this ends up happening, and I guess we're still at a point where we don't know for sure that that is certainly the direction it's going to go, I guess it is then also the American space program or the American government basically saying, okay, China can can have the moon.

20:47 We are giving that up because maybe we can't make it there anyway because the rocket that we were going to take is not going to be ready.

20:53 Yeah. I mean, I I even before the Trump administration came into office, I would speak to senior NASA officials who think that China is going to beat the US back to the moon. And, you know, as a propaganda coup, you can decide how much people around the world will care about that or people in the US will care about that.

21:10 You know, we've already been there, is one response. But I think it does show that, you know, the traditional explanation for the original Apollo program is that it was about geopolitical signaling during the Cold War to show which country has technological mastery. Well, if China gets back to the moon before the US does, that's a pretty unambiguous signal.

21:29 And I don't think anyone is going to take the answer of, oh, well, we'll be in Mars in five or ten years as very compelling. Which is one reason why Ted Cruz in Congress don't like this budget. And the other thing is like, if we do want to go back to the moon, like there are pathways for the US to achieve that.

21:48 Jeff Bezos is building a moon lander that might fly as soon as this year. And if that would be ready, that could be used. And there's some people in Washington who see the possibility. Of Jeff Bezos gets the moon and Elon Musk gets Mars as a way to sort of square the circle here. But those ideas were much more popular before the massive cuts at NASA because if you're doing a both and you really need a lot of money, the either-or makes it much more difficult.

22:17 Am I right that the Bezos Blue Origin launcher is a result of that contest a few years ago where they basically just said, okay, we're going to give SpaceX a contract and we're going to give Blue Origin a contract as well as like a backup so that we're not causing political feuds or whatnot here. Is am I right about that or am I misremembering it?

22:36 You're kind of right, and I may be kind of wrong, not to be rude, but yes. That's okay. There was a big contract fight over what's called the Human Landing System, HLS, which is gonna bring astronauts from the Lockheed Martin built Orion spacecraft around the moon down to the surface and back up again.

22:54 NASA had a openly bidded contract for this where anybody could submit a proposal for how to do this. The one thing about Slagin on SpaceX is, and despite the challenges of the Starship development program, they submitted a bid that was cheaper than anybody else's and rated by NASA officials as technically quite sound.

23:17 And it's probably worth noting that the person who made that decision later went to go work for SpaceX a couple years later. But I don't think there was chicanery in how they won that contract. But what NASA likes to do and what it has done pretty consistently over the past couple years is have two redundant systems to do anything it wants to do.

23:38 And that was a lesson of the space shuttle. When the space shuttle was retired and there was no backup or alternative, that was when we were dependent on the Russians. And so ever since when they did the commercial cargo, there were two different vehicles. Northrop Brumman made one as well as SpaceX.

23:55 Commercial crew was supposed to have two different vehicles, but Boeing's spacecraft has been a disaster for several years. And so I guess now we can look at the record of the last decade and say, oh, well, we need to learn from these commercial partnerships and redundancy because we keep getting these players who don't deliver.

24:15 But SpaceX was the one who kept delivering. After SpaceX won that contract, uh, NASA did not have the budget for two redundant systems. And so they basically said, all right, we'll pay SpaceX and do the one good job twice. Jeff Bezos sued. That is why ultimately we got a second provider and we got Congress to step in and plus up that funding, which I believe it was our friend Bernie Sanders who memorably called it the Bezos bailout.

24:42 That's not necessarily true. Like it wasn't a bailout for him, but it was kind of a bailout for NASA's hopes of getting to the moon. And maybe now if that scenario comes true where we need Blue Origins moonlander because Starship isn't ready, that might be looked back upon as like a good decision. But as always, with all of these very politically influential billionaires, there are always these questions of influence and whether things are appropriate.

25:08 And it's only going to get worse in the next couple years, too.

25:12 It would be funny if you know it the moon mission does happen because Jeff Bezos sued to try to get the additional contract, right? Yeah, it would be it would be very ironic. There was one other piece of the moon mission mission I wanted to ask about because I feel like when I hear people talk about the potential of a Mars mission in the future, people who are much more knowledgeable about space than I am often say, okay, like even if you want to go to Mars, we still need the moon mission because there's a lot of learning that comes out of that mission that can then be applied to a mission to go out to Mars.

25:46 Would you say that that is accurate? And if the moon mission doesn't happen, then does that also like kneecap any attempt to get to Mars in the next five or 10 years or whatever as well?

25:57 Prefacing all of this by saying that I am not an aerospace engineer either. Moon versus Mars is like the oldest debate, you know, in the US space program since the Clinton administration, when like the space shuttle was done and we were like, all right, what are we doing next? And the ISS is done, what are we doing next?

26:16 There's been a huge back and forth fight. The other thing is it isn't this is not all just a question of like engineering and technology and science. It's also a question of politics and financial sustainability. Like, you know, if we wanted to spend, you know, Apollo level funding, percentage points of GDP, could we build you know vehicles to go to Mars before going to the moon?

26:43 Yes. Theoretically, yes, we could do that. It would just be hugely expensive, and society would need to say that's what we're doing. I don't anticipate society saying that. And so, from a vehicle development point of view, going to the moon is helpful in several respects. But I think the Mars people have a point in saying that the way you land on either astronomical body is very different.

27:11 The moon doesn't have an atmosphere, it doesn't have as much gravity, Mars does have a little atmosphere, it has more gravity, so you need parachutes and one. So it's it is two very different problems. But in terms of the stuff that you really need, like powerful rocket engines, life support systems that are very efficient, solar power systems, robotics that you can deploy, all of that is much cheaper to test and develop around the moon.

27:39 And so I think that there is a very strong case to be made that that is the appropriate stepping stone. There's also an aspect of it that is more unproven, but we do believe that there's a good amount of water on the moon in the form of ice. And one thing that a lot of people are trying to do right now at NASA and Japan and Europe, private sector folks, is go to the moon and see if we can harvest that water and use it to make rocket fuel.

28:06 And if that turns out to be feasible, that's a very big advantage in deep space exploration because one of the hardest things is flying up all of the propellant we need from Earth into space. So there are very good reasons to think we should go to the moon first, mostly for practical and pragmatic reasons, not for any kind of big engineering reason, I guess.

28:26 Do you know if the Chinese have a Mars project as well, or are they more focused on the moon right now?

28:31 They have Mars um projects that are robotic projects, similar to the US ones right now, uh not quite as advanced, but for human exploration, they are focused solely on the moon right now, is my understanding, at least in like the next decade.

28:48 Going back to the budget just slightly, you know, you talked about how there's this proposal to cut NASA's budget significantly. My understanding is that really focuses on a lot of the scientific programs more than the human kind of spaceflight parts of that. Is that is that right?

29:03 The emphasis is definitely on cutting the science stuff. There are cuts to future uh exploration things, mainly to vehicles that compete with SpaceXs on like the moon exploration side. But no, the the majority of the cuts come to NASA science uh division. And it's hard to say which specific programs they would affect.

29:24 But in particular, uh there is a new big telescope being built called the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. It would be the successor to the James Webb Space Telescope that launched a few years ago. And that in particular seems to be on the cutting block. And in particular, they're looking to cut the entire Goddard Space Center, which is in Maryland.

29:44 It's one of a handful of big NASA research centers. And it's not clear why they targeted that one, except that it does have a lot of heliophysics, sun study stuff, climate studies, earth science that the agency is, I guess, deprioritizing. But we will see if if Congress lets them.

30:03 That would be so huge if that ends up getting cut. I feel like on the telescope, they need to, you know, make sure we see more of those beautiful photos that come from James Webb to convince them. I know there's a lot of science and stuff that happens too, but like, you know, thinking of the public and the PR, it's like, look at all the nice things we can see about its face.

30:18 Don't you want more of this? Yeah, we do.

30:21 I this is again cynical, but there was that report a few weeks ago of, oh, we might have detected a signature of life at a distant exoplanet that has already been poo-pooed by scientists now, but it did get James Webb into the news.

30:33 Totally, make some headlines, right? For someone who's just watching, who maybe you know hasn't followed Elon Musk too closely or the specifics of the arguments that he makes around space, you would probably imagine that someone who is arguing that we need to colonize other planets, become a multiplanetary species, would want to see like as much money as possible going into the space program and would be arguing for a bigger NASA budget for science and human exploration and everything.

30:58 Do we know how Elon Musk feels about these potential cuts to the NASA budget? Because as you were saying, there's this kind of view that he feels NASA is holding SpaceX back rather than wanting to continue to promote and expand what NASA is doing. What do you see there?

31:12 It is a very interesting question, in particular, because SpaceX really owes its existence to NASA. It would have failed long ago without that agency. And Musk has always been publicly very grateful and says nice things to the NASA administrators. But, you know, he is very influential in this administration, and we're seeing cuts happen during some of the initial firings uh that were planned that were supposed to be uh some cuts at NASA that got delayed, and it was supposedly because Elon delayed them.

31:43 But I think a couple things are going on. One is, you know, Musk has never been interested in the moon, and he much prefers Mars, and he would like NASA to reflect that. He is strongly of the view that NASA should be doing, basically, NASA shouldn't do anything that a private company could do. And so if that, even if that involves like building spacecraft to, you know, do scientific missions, then I don't think he he wants them to do that.

32:12 Um, he's always questioned NASA's contracting decisions, usually when they go to his competitors. And so it's it's not clear if he's trying to build the agency in his image. And and that is why I think it's important to think about the other actors like Russ Vod at the OMB, like Doge, DEI, Climate Purge, because it doesn't necessarily make sense if you imagine just like Elon Musk as the dictator of NASA, would he do all these things?

32:38 I don't know. The part where he does like a billion dollars more in Mars funding, sure he would do that. And the interesting thing is, you know, it's kind of a drop in the bucket to him, but the issue for the rest of the industry is all these science missions, all that money is mainly going to the private sector.

32:55 It's going to the contractors who are building these things and testing them. It's going to hurt the supply chain and the workforce for all across space, and it's going to mean like less rocket launches that you know Elon Musk could bid on. So I think it's a little short-sighted, and that's certainly what aerospace industry lobbyists are saying.

33:15 And the other thing with Musk is it's just not clear, you know, how he's spending his time with all of his companies, with everything he's involved with in the government. Has he been talking about the NASA science budget? Does he listen to anyone who talks to him about it? I don't know. One thing that I've been reporting on is that there's just, as I said, not much in the way of space people in the White House.

33:36 And I've even heard people being told, you know, go talk to ex-VP at SpaceX about this because they might be able to get Elon to do something about it. Right now it's just so hard to say who's behind anything, and paranoia is everywhere.

33:51 It seems odd to me because you know, you hear the way Elon Musk talks about Mars, and it's kind of like, you know, it's this planet just ready for us to inhabit. When you know, you speak to people who understand the science, and they're like, this would be really difficult. You know, there's a lot of things that we need to learn if we were to, you know, seriously think about colonizing this other planet.

34:08 And, you know, I was talking to Zach Wienersmith last year, who was saying, like, if we were serious about this, we'd be making huge investments in the space science to actually understand, you know, what it would look like to live there, to reproduce there on this other planet, to grow food, all these other sorts of things.

34:22 And it seems like that piece is something that Elon Musk, despite talking so much about, you know, colonizing other planets, living on Mars, seems far less concerned about when it's actually really important to this project he claims to really support.

34:36 Yeah, it has always been an open question ever since he, you know, in 2016 was the first time he unveiled what would become Starship as his this is gonna take me to Mars thing. And consistently people have been asking him about deep space radiation, terraforming, how would you live, what would the government be?

34:53 The government would be Twitter. None of the answers are super compelling. And in my framework of how SpaceX and Elon Musk work, you know, SpaceX is very successful at executing, and one of the reasons is they attract a lot of talented people. And I think that was a function of if you were, you know, just got your master's in aerospace engineering circa 2013, you could go work for SpaceX, which was building and launching rockets all the time with a guy who wants to go to Mars, like a vision of that, or you could go work for a traditional contractor that might launch a satellite every 10 years, and the CEO is talking about gross margins and share buybacks.

35:35 And so anybody who like gives a shit about it would go work at SpaceX, and that benefited them a lot. And I sort of was like, okay, Mars is this teleological end goal, but what really matters about SpaceX is their reusable rocket and everything they're doing in low Earth orbit and Starlink, all these things that have an impact here on Earth.

35:54 And the Mars stuff just kind of enables that as like a future thing, and maybe 20 years in the future we'll go to Mars. But now that Musk is being like, oh, we're gonna do it by the end of the decade, which he's also been saying for a while, these questions become much more pressing. And also the question of funding, because even the billion dollars he's getting from NASA, NASA's gonna spend on Mars, whatever the profits that SpaceX is generating, like there's not enough money to make this happen without big changes.

36:24 So it becomes increasingly the closer he brings the target date, the more these questions about the basics of survival become more important.

36:34 And you you talked about Starship earlier, you know, this big uh rocket that's not just supposed to be the one to bring us to the moon, but you know, was really central to this vision of Mars colonization that Elon Musk has been presented. And as you were just saying, there's a real question as to whether this is actually going to be ready in time for the moon launch, but I've also heard broader concerns about Starship more generally, that it can actually achieve the types of things that Elon Musk has set out for it, that it can carry the volumes that have been claimed it will be able to carry.

37:05 You know, we've seen this ship, you know, blow up a number of times in these different experiments, you know, as the company is trying to refine what it is. We know this is the way that they tend to test these things to launch them to see what happens, and then you know, have some learnings to try to improve for the next iteration.

37:22 But is it reaching a point where there are bigger questions about the feasibility of the Starship project?

37:27 I think so. And and again, with my I'm not an aerospace engineer hat on. But in looking at like a development program like this from the outside, it's hard to say. But what I can say is like what we've seen this year is they launched two second versions of this vehicle. It's V2 is what they're called, or block two, I think, is what they're calling it.

37:46 And both times it broke apart before getting to orbit. Whatever else you want to say, they have not gotten to orbit yet with any of their vehicles in the last two years, and they haven't gotten this vehicle to fly. That doesn't mean that they can't do it. My introduction to SpaceX was watching their test campaign for their reusable Falcon Knight, which also saw a lot of rockets blow up.

38:09 But every time there was a lot more transparency on what went wrong, and they would identify it, and it would usually be one issue. And you would see, and this is like the big watchword of SpaceX is iteration. We go a little further every time, you would see them iterate, and so you know, it would land a little better, be a little closer, and you could watch that progress.

38:33 And the other thing that's important to remember with like Falcon 9 reusability is they were experimenting with something that was already expendable. So if you don't try and reuse the first stage of a rocket, it's going in the ocean, goodbye. So they weren't losing any money. I mean, they were they were losing some money, but it was not the same as launching a whole rocket that is supposed to be reusable and having it blow up.

38:58 It's just a bigger setback. And the fact that like going from that block one rocket to the block two rocket, you know, it was much longer. It had new plumbing, it had new tanking. Typically, when you're iterating, you know, you're making smaller changes so that you can track them better. And SpaceX, I mean, you gotta say, these are the most advanced aerospace engineers out there.

39:22 They have incredible telemetry, they have built all of these tools for launching rockets. They know better than me. But just based on what we've seen, they're not getting up to cadence. The big issue they've had with the FAA is the FAA won't let them fly more than five launches a year. Well, they've never been able to do that.

39:44 You know, the most they've ever done is four, and most of their delays are these mishap investigations after things go wrong. And so I guess from the outside, it's not clear how they're trying to push the envelope. You know, there's this concept of engineering in aerospace where every time you fly, you push the envelope, so normal performance gets bigger.

40:04 And I don't understand coherently how they're trying to push it. Now, one thing you can say is they're landing that big first stage heavy booster back at Starbase very consistently. That's really impressive, but it's not as hard. I don't know if anyone has ever seen Jeff Bezos give this talk, but he loves giving a talk about how when you're landing a rocket, the bigger it is, the better it is.

40:26 Because if you try and balance a pencil on your finger, you can't do it. But if you did a broomstick, you could. So maybe that's not as impressive. The real problem with Starship is probably the thermal protection. For a reusable rocket of that size to go in and out of the atmosphere, it needs to survive incredible heat.

40:43 They're doing a stainless steel body and carbon panels that have not been tested before. And the issue is when we're talking about like the future performance of Starship, Elon is talking about like the vision for you know what they started at and worked backwards from. What we're actually gonna get could be very different.

41:06 Uh with the Falcon 9 as a reference again. When they first announced like the final version of the Falcon 9, the Block 5, he said, we're gonna refly one of these rockets twice in 24 hours. So we'll launch it, we'll bring it back, we'll refurb it and launch it again within 24 hours. They never did that because they never had to.

41:25 There's no economic reason to do that. And and probably because they can't. Who knows? But they were able to like increase the rates, and now they can fly these things more than 10 times, which nobody thought was possible. But the issue is the rates for Starship are so crazy. You know, when we talk about the moon landing, one thing is to get starship from the Earth to the Moon, they need to refuel it after it gets to orbit.

41:52 And to refuel it, they need to launch 10 more starships to carry the fuel, and then they dock in space and transfer the fuel, which incidentally has never been demonstrated. They're supposed to do it this year. I don't think they're going to. If you just think to go on that one trip to the moon, they need to launch the moonship, they need to launch a tanker that's going to be up there to hold the fuel, and then 10 more starships.

42:17 They've not launched more than four of these in a year. So to get to a cadence where you would reasonably do a moon mission that involves launching 12 to 14 spacecraft in less than a year, let's say, I mean, that seems very far away. And when I talk to engineers who think a lot about thermal protection systems, you know, they're like, oh, well, Elon says he's going to reuse it 25 times without refurbishment.

42:43 What's really going to happen is they're going to get it to the point where they can like fly it once and then refurb it in like six weeks. They'll build 25 of them and just be using them that way. And that makes sense maybe technologically, but I don't know if that will match up with the concept of operations SpaceX has for rapid reuse and if those books close.

43:06 And SpaceX loves proving people wrong, but that next starship flight better better not explode over the Gulf of Mexico.

43:14 Yeah, absolutely. Or there's going to be even more questions. I I had no idea about the refueling thing and how you needed to launch 10 more starships just to fuel this one.

43:23 10 is a conservative estimate. There's been some space, like some NASA documents that say dozens. And again, it comes back to that question of how much capacity does Starship have when it takes off, when it's operational.

43:37 Right. Yeah. Because I I've read some things about the volume that it can hold actually being less than what was previously kind of um imagined it it would do, or estimated, or whatnot, I guess, depending on how this stuff plays out.

43:48 That is probably true. I think basically every rocket advertises like a map a payload that it will bring, and that is like under very ideal conditions, or maybe like once we've worked out the kinks. Like it's true. Falcon 9's payload expanded as like the engines got more powerful and they improved it.

44:05 But again, that took many years.

44:06 So you're talking there about the issues with Starship, right? And as I was listening to you say that, I was also thinking about Tesla, right? You know, when we think about Tesla as you know, this leader in the electric vehicle space, and over the past few years has run into a lot of troubles where it is facing more competition from Chinese automakers, but also other Western automakers as well.

44:27 And of course, you know, put a lot of uh energy and effort behind the Cybertruck and the Robotaxi. And it's not clear that those products are, you know, kind of working out, and it feels like they're really losing the momentum and the market share. I was wondering on the space side of things, you know, are we seeing potential issues with SpaceX's dominance here as other players are rising up and maybe the Starship isn't working out as previously planned?

44:52 What do you see on that, on that side of things?

44:54 Yeah, well, so there are two sort of dynamics that are related. So one is unlike Tesla, where you have many, many car companies trying to compete with them, for the Rockets, there are a couple people trying to compete and they just can't do it. SpaceX continues to dominate launch and will continue to dominate launch for many years to come, at least in the West, in Europe and the United States.

45:19 And that's just because Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, the European national champion Ariane Space, United Launch Alliance, the sort of incumbent military industrial competitor. None of these guys are flying rockets that are as capable or as cheap as the Falcon 9. That's it. But you could say Blue Origin's new rocket is just supposedly about to come online.

45:45 And if it performs the way that they have said it will, SpaceX will be under some real pressure. Uh, there's another company called Rocket Lab. That's a US-New Zealand company. They have a small rocket that is very, very good. They're trying to build a Falcon 9 competitor that might fly by the end of the year.

46:02 If they get that going, I think SpaceX will have a real problem. Uh, there are Chinese rocket companies out there trying to compete with them, but you can't buy a rocket from China. But the other thing that I think is interesting when you think about like the Cybertruck, one of the cool things about the Falcon 9, it was kind of a miracle of like customer-centric design.

46:22 Like they went out to people who operate satellites and they sort of said, What do you need? What actually do you need? Because they started off with a small rocket called the Falcon 1 that they got off the ground, but it didn't really have much of a market. But NASA wanted a medium rocket, and so did all the other satellite operators.

46:39 And in the Falcon 9, they have made like a product that people love. And you might compare it to the earlier Tesla cars. People wanted an electric car that was reasonably priced, and I got it. Now with Starship, that's not really based on like what customers are trying to pay for right now. That is based on if I were an engineer and wanted to create a vehicle that would revolutionize the space economy, it would be heavy lift and it would be reusable.

47:11 That's what they started from. And if they do it, it will be an incredible thing. But there's not a line of certainly private companies, like the Pentagon loves it. But there's not that market there for it unless it's perfect. And I think with the Cybertruck, you know, I don't know exactly what customer they were designing for, but I don't think they hit the nail on the head of what there's a big market for.

47:38 And so if you don't engineer it perfectly and you're not thinking about what the customer needs, you might be in trouble. You know, it feels like both Starship and Tesla and like the Cybertruck were engineered for Elon, not the customer, I guess is a shorter way to say that.

47:53 I think it sets up a bad comparison for Starship, if that is kind of what SpaceX is really dependent on for the next stage, right? Because if it doesn't work out, then that it's a huge cost and it really needs to deliver, right? So Jared Isaacman proposed to be the new head of NASA, someone who has ties with SpaceX and Elon Musk, you know, is a space entrepreneur, if I understand that correctly.

48:16 There have also been some headlines that have said that, you know, he isn't in total agreement with Elon Musk all the time, uh, and others saying that he would basically be Elon's man at NASA. How are you thinking about Jared Isaacman? Who is this guy? What might he mean for NASA if he gets confirmed?

48:31 Uh he's a very interesting character. I think it's actually probably not correct to call him a space entrepreneur. He um started off uh as a high schooler in the early days of the internet. He started an online payments company that he built. It's called Shift 4, and he built it into like a very successful publicly traded payments company, made his fortune, decided that he was really interested in aviation, started a company that bought fighter jets, like Russian surplus fighter jets, so he could learn to fly them, and he made that into like a company that helps the US Air Force train.

49:08 And then he got into space right when Elon Musk started offering space tourism trips, basically. There's a spectrum of ways to be a space tourist. And Isaacman took it to the max. He went and he bought a whole vehicle for himself. He created like a scientific research agenda like NASA, a charitable component, a whole thing, flew a mission on the dragon, orbited the Earth, really cool, first all private mission, and so and and raised a lot of money for St.

49:38 Jude's Cancer Hospital. At this point, I'm like, all right, well, this is, you know, if you're like a super rich guy into space, this is a pretty classy way to do it. And then he became even more enmeshed with SpaceX through a couple ways. His company started doing payments for Starlink. So when you're like paying for Starlink, you're going through shift four.

49:56 His company invested in SpaceX, which is pretty interesting. And he personally bought a series of missions called Polaris, where there were going to be two dragon missions. That's the smaller human spacecraft. And then he would be one of the first people to fly on Starship when that was ready. He did the first of those missions last year.

50:16 It was the first private spacewalk in SpaceX's new space suits. It was a big triumph. And I was like, oh, well, Elon is very clever. He's gotten some guy to pay to test his vehicles for him. That's that's quite smart. But then after the election, suddenly it comes out Isaacman is tapped to be the NASA administrator.

50:33 And so what do you want in a NASA administrator? Typically, it's a former engineer, former astronaut, NASA person, or like a the most famous, you know, probably like the guy who led NASA through the Apollo uh program was a lawyer. And so it's you're running a big political organization. You know, he's run a big company, so he's an administrator.

50:56 He obviously cares about space, that's important. But you can't come up with a path to this guy being NASA administrator without Elon Musk knowing him and saying that he should go through. And so, like in his confirmation hearing, obviously there was a bunch of questions like was Elon Musk present when the president was interviewing you and he gave this stilted non-answer again and again.

51:17 It's just like, just say he was there. No one is under the impression that you're not involved with Elon. Are they on the same side on everything? Probably not. I don't know. I think it's interesting, you know, you know, Shift 4 had a DEI program. And, you know, he seems like his political views are probably more middle of the road than Elon's based on his public statements.

51:39 Uh, I don't think he's a lefty, I don't think he's super hard right, I think he's like just a guy who cares about going to space. But what I think is maybe notable is, you know, when he went up for his confirmation hearing, he literally promised the moon and stars. You know, all of these members of Congress were like, what are you gonna prioritize?

51:58 He said everything, we can do it all. And then the White House came and said, Well, we're cutting 25% of your budget. And so the next time he's gonna go talk to Congress, assuming that he is confirmed and seems like it, although the budget didn't help, he's gonna be explaining how he's gonna cut everything and why that's a good idea.

52:16 So I think it's it's gonna be tough for him because I don't think necessarily that he feels the need to cut all climate science and DEI stuff, but he will have to justify it. He does care a lot, I think, about human exploration and going to Mars. I think he and Elon are sympathetic on that. But I don't know what his vision really is personally, other than more commercial, more private sector stuff, and just doing more.

52:43 Uh, and I think it's gonna be hard for him to figure out how to do that at NASA.

52:47 I feel like when it comes to these guys, you know, like a Jarrett Isaacman or even Elon Musk or this wider industry, one of the things that it feels like they really want to do with NASA and with military and aerospace contracting more broadly is to redirect more of that money toward these kind of new private companies operating in these spaces rather than say, you know, the old way that NASA would do it and its reliance on, you know, the Boeings and Lockeys of the world.

53:16 You know, what do you make of that, the push in that direction? Because obviously they would argue that, you know, look at what SpaceX has achieved by bringing costs down. But then is there also risk of kind of sidelining an organization like NASA and putting more of the responsibility, I guess, on these private companies over this kind of public agency?

53:33 It's a really good question. And I wish that it would be possible for people to have it, have this conversation divorced from everything that's happening, because there are really big problems with the way NASA has traditionally approached its engineering projects. There's a lot of pork, there's plenty of soft corruption.

53:51 And I think one reason that so many people, even within NASA, were very excited about SpaceX, certainly in the first couple of years, was that, oh, it promised we could free up resources, we could do more cheaply. Uh, you know, there's there was one, I wrote a very glowing story uh for publication called Quartz when NASA switched rockets for uh the Europa Clipper mission that launched this year.

54:14 And they switched it from the SLS to SpaceX's Falcon and saved like $500 million. I mean, that's a lot of money. In theory, that helps you do more good stuff. And so, like procurement reform, like the idea that we're not going to do these cost plus contracts that guarantee the contractor a profit and don't really discipline them for failing to deliver, we should move in this fixed price direction.

54:40 But some of those contracts aren't playing out well. And one of the issues is now that SpaceX and other companies have succeeded initially, other companies have realized there's this playbook of getting a lot of VC funding, underbidding on something, getting into the development process, and then raising your prices later on.

55:03 And that's having kind of a pernicious effect. But I think when it comes to NASA contracting, you know, there's there's two things going on. One is that NASA was doing a lot of stuff that the private sector could do, and we saw that in like launch vehicles. Developing a rocket that goes to low Earth orbit is not the hardest thing anymore in the 2000s.

55:25 What is harder is, you know, going to land on an asteroid, you know, going to sail through the atmosphere of Europa. The short answer is well, NASA should do stuff that's never been done before, and the private sector should do what is routine. But in practice, there's like a real gray area there, and it's hard to sort out what is what.

55:47 And so, you know, there was a really good report, not really good, but an interesting report I thought came out last year from a guy named Norm Augustine, who's like 90 now, and he's just like the gray old man of aerospace, just looking at like what NASA should do. And basically, like NASA is in trouble because it's shifted a lot of money into like missions that it's trying to do, because those get attention, but not like the buildings are crumbling, the infrastructure is not good, like, and they're losing their expertise because they're outsourcing stuff to like SpaceX.

56:20 And so, how do you create an organization that can efficiently outsource to the private sector the things that it should while maintaining like the expertise to be able to say, no, SpaceX, that's not right when they're wrong, and do these like far out things that have never been done before? And so the last like 15 years of NASA, there has been an effort to sort of shift in that direction with like commercial crew, for example, but the moon stuff was supposed to be traditionally done.

56:50 And now with Artemis, you know, we're doing the human landing systems in the sort of public-private partnership model. Are they really working? Whereas the very overpriced and expensive rocket, the SLS rocket, is there and ready to go, even though it costs $4 billion a pop. So I think one thing that I have learned covering this, when I started covering this, I was like, oh, this disruptive company is gonna save taxpayer money and allow us to do more space exploration, and that's gonna be great.

57:18 And that was true, but also it has disrupted the way NASA works, and no one has been able to figure out the proper public-private roles. And now it's really irritating with all the efficiency stuff going on because there is a really good conversation to be had about how to make NASA more efficient, but that's not what's happening.

57:39 They're just cutting shit.

57:40 It's not a surprise that we come back around to like, there are benefits to this new model, but there are also drawbacks, and we should kind of make a good decision based on a true understanding rather than just, you know, what an Elon Musk or someone like that wants us to believe. Uh, Tim, I feel like there's so many things I could ask you.

57:56 I feel like we could keep talking for a whole other hour. I feel like I'm gonna have to have you back on the show to talk about Starlink because we basically didn't touch on it. But I have one final question for you. Obviously, we see this really close relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

58:09 And we can see, you know, publicly that it has caused some damage to Tesla and Tesla's reputation and its market share in many countries. You know, if Tesla was facing business issues, now it has, you know, these declining sales in part because of Elon Musk's reputation. Does that translate over to the space business as well?

58:28 You know, has have we been seeing growing questions about, say, the use of SpaceX rockets or or Starlink satellites there? Or is that uh you know a bit different than what we see on the Tesla side of things?

58:40 It is a bit different, and that's because you know, Tesla has, in theory, millions, thousands of customers, right? SpaceX has like 15. And now, so and the other thing that SpaceX has is kind of a monopoly on launch vehicles and on the specific sort of capability of broadband from Starlink. Uh, and the way to think about it is look at the experience of Ukraine.

59:03 The Ukrainians really like Starlink, they really need it to fight the Russians. They really don't like that Elon Musk has been hanging out with Vladimir Putin and supporting Trump's pivot on this issue. They would love to not use Starlink or give Musk money, but there's not a great capability out there to replace that.

59:22 And so they're they're scrambling, they're trying to get a European solution. If Amazon manages to get its Kuiper satellites working, you will see, I think, a lot of similar customer service effects where people have the luxury of saying, I don't want to work with this company or this person. But for the rockets, there's not another option.

59:42 And so, you know, even if there are people, and again, these are big government agencies mainly or like big Fortune 500 companies, if they could buy a different thing, maybe they would, but they can't. So we'll have to see.

59:55 Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see if this like accelerates that effort to create uh real competition there and if the other companies can actually make it work, right? In these different parts of the world where that's being pushed. Uh, Tim, it's been really fascinating to talk to you to learn more about what's going on in this broader space, you know, because we're all interested in what happens, you know, out there in the stars.

1:00:15 But, you know, there are real kind of political and economic decisions that fuel a lot of that. And it's good to understand what's happening there. So thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight. Tim Fernholz is a senior reporter at Payload Space and the author of Rocket Billionaires.

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