Elon Musk is “imagining a future in which neither his network nor his will can be restrained by the people of this world,” according to The Atlantic. On Tuesday, the outlet gave a warning for the government not to rely solely on Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink.
“The U.S. government would have good reasons to avoid full dependence on Musk’s company for access to the space-based internet,” staff writer Ross Andersen penned.
But, he points out, the government is close to doing just that.
Currently, the military has an orbital network of military-grade satellites. This allows for secure government communications and reconnaissance. Andersen points out, “This is a Musk product: SpaceX builds the satellites and ferries them to orbit.”
“The Pentagon’s leaders know this is a problem, or at least they once did,” Andersen said. “During the end of the Biden administration, the U.S. Space Force published a new strategy that ordered policymakers to avoid overreliance on any single company. “But that was before the Defense Department came under the control of Trump.”
Andersen reached out to the Pentagon and asked whether “avoiding overreliance on one provider was still a priority.”
He did not hear back and noted that even if the agency expands to more space vendors, the process would take years.
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The problem is that “SpaceX is so good at making satellites and getting them to space," he said.
The company can make four half-ton satellites in a day. Additionally, SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket can hold more than 25 of them at once. No other company can match that capacity today. This is because many are still building each rocket from scratch for every launch.
The Atlantic reports, “Last year, SpaceX successfully lofted 133 rockets into orbit, and more than 60 percent of them were carrying Starlink satellites. Every one of Musk’s commercial competitors, and also every nation’s military combined, launched fewer rockets than he did.”
Before Musk’s engineers began launching prototype satellites six years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 functional satellites in Earth’s orbit. Today, more than 7,000 of his satellites surround Earth, and he adds more “almost every week.”