One of those things floating around the intertubes since Trump's landslide victory and the many other "red team" triumphs a week ago, is "where does Elon Musk end up?" To me, it's only natural to ask that. After all, when Musk partnered up with Trump late in the campaign, it generated a lot of interest in his campaign. Many people have expressed the idea that the late additions to the campaign, specifically Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, were largely responsible for swinging a lot of votes to decide on Trump. Bobby Kennedy is already going after targets in the federal health industry, but he's the only one we really know about. I've seen nothing about Tulsi and nothing official on Musk.
One of my favorite sources for space-related stories is Eric Berger at Ars Technica. Berger is actually a meteorologist but switched to reporting on space years ago. An old-style reporter, he has developed a relationship with lots of sources in different companies. Because of this, it seemed natural to see his story, "Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all," published last Friday (Nov. 8).
It's a bit long and more than a little bit speculative but because of his good
sources, it's worth reading. His sources and experience are the good points.
Some of his views strike me as listening to "Trump is Hitler!! or "the
Russians control him!!" too much are the weak points. As usual in cases where I
say little besides "go read the whole thing," I'll just put up a few quotes to
hopefully build some interest.
The issue, of course, is that Musk can't remain associated with SpaceX and take a job like Bill Nelson's as NASA Administrator. Conflict of interest.
It will be a hugely weird dynamic. Musk is unquestionably in a position for self-dealing. Normally, such conflicts of interest would be frowned on within a government, but Trump has already shown a brazen disregard for norms, and there's no reason to believe that will change during his second go at the presidency. One way around this could be to give Musk a "special adviser" tag, which means he would not have to comply with federal conflict-of-interest laws.
...
Let's start with NASA and firmly establish what we mean. The US space agency does some pretty great things, but it's also a bloated bureaucracy. That's by design. Members of Congress write budgets and inevitably seek to steer more federal dollars to NASA activities in the areas they represent. Two decades ago, an engineer named Mike Griffin—someone Musk sought to hire as SpaceX's first chief engineer in 2002—became NASA administrator under President George W. Bush.
...
Notably, Musk despises NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a central element of Artemis. He sees the rocket as the epitome of government bloat. And it's not hard to understand why. The Space Launch System is completely expendable and costs about 10 to 100 times as much to launch as his own massive Starship rocket.
Us, too, Elon. Many of us. Very likely everyone not drawing a real paycheck from SLS think it's a horrific waste of money.
Another problem with cutting the size of NASA is cutting some of the 10 or 12 NASA centers around the country. As Berger said, that bloat is deliberate. What he didn't say specifically is that it's borne of congress critters saying "I'll vote for your center if you vote for mine" and that's common throughout the Department of Defense and other government agency spending.
As I write this, it might have just become a moot point. As of moments ago tonight, Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be running the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That has been all but promised for a while, now.
President Donald Trump steps on the stage at Kennedy Space Center after the successful launch of the Demo-2 crew mission in May 2020. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls