Comment by vaxman
17 hours ago
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
17 hours ago
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
Putting SpaceX under the CEO of Boeing would make SpaceX as bad as Boeing, not Boeing as good as SpaceX.
Also, it's still America. Good luck to anyone trying to "force" SpaceX, a private company, to do anything they don't want.
They may try to fix Boeing with SpaceX because they must take every effort to fix what went wrong there. They do have several other options though.
Trump admin has suggested using wartime powers to nationalize SpaceX. They're already using those powers for deportations.
I don't know if they seriously want to do it, but whether they can do it is up to a highly sympathetic SCOTUS.
They’re in a pissing match. The relationship between SpaceX and the federal government is mutually beneficial. I would be surprised if either follows through on their threats.
It hasn’t. A former advisor, Steve Bannon, suggested it while also suggesting they deport Elon. It is clearly just a swipe at Elon and not “Trump admin” seriously suggesting this.
DoD has now and has always had ultimate authority when it comes to putting things into the space above our heads. Don’t listen to the idealistic millennials and their powerful downvote buttons. ;)
"it's still America"
Is it?
no it does not seem likely, that's nonsense. the pentagon likes the spacex product just the way it is
What would be the goal?
>It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor
I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.
The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.
People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
The Defense Production Act exists.
The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions. They wouldn’t need to, though.
>The Defense Production Act exists.
Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what you think this means? Title 2 of the DPA did indeed allow seizing of private property, but like 4, 5, and 6 expired and no longer exists under present law. AFAIK only provisions of 1, 3 and 7 are still in force, and they would at most allow forcing continued Dragon production. I haven't studied it enough to know whether there is caselaw regarding interaction with the Takings Clause but I'm hardly the first to question it, at-the-time BHUA Senate Committee chairman Phil Gramm lead with that on the review of Clinton's use of the DPA for the California energy crisis. And in general commandeering and so on all require just compensation. It's also 2025, not 1955, and I'm highly skeptical the current courts wouldn't be stricter.
That's assuming it even went through at all though and SpaceX wouldn't win an argument for obvious political retaliation or other forbidden reasoning, or wouldn't drag on the legal fight long enough for 47 to be gone and the next POTUS to reverse course.
>The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions.
Have you like, opened a newspaper (physical or virtual) at all since last year? Growing debt is a huge deal, politicians are arguing over single digit billions or even millions. Hundreds of billions is not small potatoes even by American standards at this point, it's more then the entirety of veterans benefits & services, well over double all education, training, employment & social services, triple the entire transportation budget, etc. It'd be a big fucking line item to take on, and would require Congressional funding.
>They wouldn’t need to, though.
Yeah, they would.
What you need to know is that the Pentagon has ultimate authority in matters like this (regardless of the contractor’s equity structure) and it has wielded it time and time again throughout the Cold War. SpaceX cannot escape the command structure by “decommissioning” anything. If you use drugs and threaten US interests in jest, you are done. Those are hard rules. Perhaps Musk will wind up emaciated with footlong fingernails living on the top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas or Florida, but he will not still influence the assets at SpaceX in such a state, regardless of his wealth, passion, allegiance, intelligence, charisma, army of sycophants, children named after chemicals, etc. He can work out his relationship with personalities in the US government, but his arse is cooked in terms of command of dual-use orbital transit and communications systems. The people at SpaceX deserve so much better anyway.
https://youtu.be/65_FeMUuCl0 https://youtu.be/0kpNkEdB1o0
> The real plan
Ugh that is being way too generous. A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
>A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
No, this is completely opposite to reality. The current US private space industry was absolutely the result in large part of a rare modern spell of good policy decisions and sustained support (and absolutely yes, a certain amount of luck, but it's important to create conditions where luck can snowball). Support that has paid off in spades and now is self-sustaining sure, but that's a good thing and doesn't change the vital nature of the bootstrapping period. Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew were critical, as was opening up national security launches then actually embracing it. Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it, from awarding NSSL launch contracts with an eye towards which player really needed them to stay in business to being willing to take on more risk for less critical payloads. It hasn't been a short road or one without bumps and conflicting interests, and it's almost a miracle it happened at all given Congress' general shortsightedness and desire to use space almost purely as a vehicle for pork regardless of efficiency, but happen it did (ironically thanks in significant part to Boeing [0]). The contrast with the slow, anemic and visionless efforts of the EU during the same time period is striking.
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0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/actually-boeing-is-p...
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