This week’s rapid, unscheduled disassembly of Elon Musk’s bromance with Donald Trump has left officials at America’s space and security agencies reeling.
One NASA official, wary of the agency’s dependence on SpaceX as the space exploration industry’s leading recipient of government contracts, said the bitter public feud between the president and the former DOGE chief had at first been “entertaining” but that later, “it turned really terrifying,” per the Washington Post.
Musk and Trump’s falling out was received with similar horror at the Pentagon, the Post’s report continued where officials initially thought it was “funny” watching the pair trade barbs on their respective social media sites before “there was a realization that we’re not watching TV. This is a real issue.”
Both NASA and the Department of Defence have reportedlt embarked on a blitz of calls in recent days to SpaceX competitors, urging firms like Sierra Space, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, to accelerate development of their rocket systems after Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s contracts on Thursday night.
Contracts held by SpaceX with the U.S. government, worth many billions of dollars, cover a wide variety of services, from launching satellites for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to flying cargo and people to and from the International Space Station.
Officials at NASA were apparently particularly concerned by Musk’s threats, which he’s since walked back, to discontinue SpaceX’s use of its Dragon craft, which would potentially have left the agency without means of transporting astronauts to the orbiting research station.
“When you realize that he’s willing to shut everything down just on an impulse, that kind of behavior and the dependence on him is dangerous,” as one member of the agency told the Post. “I can tell you there is deep concern within NASA.”
