‘We must ask ourselves what human needs could be satisfied with these billions of dollars to be spent on war preparations? By demanding that these billions be spent for human needs and not for making war, how much war and devastation could be averted?’
The world’s richest person makes much of his fortune from government contracts. Elon Musk has facilities in California, Florida, Washington state and Texas involved in designing, developing and building rockets for NASA. Recently he moved his headquarters to Texas, a state with the lowest percentage of people with health insurance, a place where maternal mortality shot up after abortions were banned, the state with the 10th worst poverty rate, and a state where Medicaid expansion was voted down by the legislature. Texas is a very poor state, but it’s a place where companies have low corporate taxes and lax environmental and other regulations, and where the wealthy will pay no income tax. No wonder it holds great appeal to a billionaire like Musk.
SpaceX built itself into one of the nation’s largest federal contractors before the start of the second Trump administration. NASA has already paid SpaceX more money than even the Pentagon has. Over the past decade SpaceX received a total of $13 billion in contracts for services such as delivering cargo and astronauts into orbit and sending NASA’s biggest and most expensive probes into outer space.
For fiscal year 2024, SpaceX received commitments for $3.8 billion spread over hundreds of contracts. This year, Congress added $40 million for commercial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services to the fiscal 2025 spending bill. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push.
SpaceX Aids U.S. Military Missions
While NASA’s contracts with SpaceX are a source of great profit to Elon Musk, it is the military missions that SpaceX can help fulfill for the government that might be even more lucrative and are more hidden from the general public.
The SpaceForce division of the US military plans to use services from companies such as SpaceX that have commercial capabilities useful to the military as a means of keeping their costs down, and they can more rapidly be utilized than SpaceForce developing its own.
The Pentagon has warned of space weapon threats from Russia, especially it’s hypersonic missiles, which could be capable of disabling entire satellite networks. Hypersonic weapons are missiles and vehicles capable of exceeding Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. They can evade traditional missile defenses of the type the US currently has, making them a crucial component of future military operations.
The U.S. wants to ramp up funding and support for hypersonic weapons development to keep pace with China and Russia, former Pentagon official and hypersonics expert Mark Lewis told Space News. China is building its system of very low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, but it’s not expected to catch up to the US for a few years.
The U. S. government plans to develop a missile defense shield, known as Golden Dome, as national policy, citing threats from ballistic, hypersonic, nuclear and cruise missiles. This effort could cost $100 billion annually, according to one estimate.
Musk’s Starshield network is part of the U.S. government’s efforts to become the dominant military power in space. Starshield combines SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which have commercial purposes, with additional high-tech military capabilities for surveillance, imaging, communication, remote sensing and early ballistic missile warning over the entire globe.
SpaceX’s Starshield unit reportedly won a $1.8 billion contract from the U.S. government’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to build a network of hundreds of spy satellites. A U.S. government database shows several SpaceX satellite missions considered to be prototypes for the Starshield network that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged.
The total value of Musk’s contracts with the Department of Defense is estimated to be in the billions of dollars, but the true figures are classified. (This is in addition to the value of Musk’s contracts with NASA.) NRO is considered to be one of the “big five” U.S. intelligence agencies, having “virtually no federal workforce,” using instead, “tens of thousands” of defense contractor personnel. This is another source of cost savings.
The conflict between President Trump letting loose Elon Musk’s DOGE to gain access to vast quantities of government data, including information about its rivals, while receiving enormous military contracts, creates an invitation to graft and corruption on a scale we’ve never seen before.
“We will never know if SpaceX would authentically win competitions for these awards because all of the offices in government intended to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest have been beheaded or defunded,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks federal contracts, to the New York Times. “The abuse of power and corruption that is spreading across federal agencies because of Musk’s dual roles is horrifying,” she said. The situation of a multi billionaire who funded the President’s re-election getting massive government contracts is ripe for corruption.
While we ponder the enormity of these plans and their immense costs, we must ask ourselves what human needs could be satisfied with these billions of dollars to be spent on war preparations?
By demanding that these billions be spent for human needs and not for making war, how much war and devastation could be averted? What elevated standard of living could the majority of us experience with these billions? It’s time we organize ourselves to accomplish these tasks by helping to link up people’s organizations across the country to strengthen us for our battles for peace.
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Karel Riley works with the People’s Tribune, and its bilingual sister publication, Tribuno del Pueblo, as a writer and contributor on human rights and women’s issues. “I’ve been a feminist since early adulthood. As a clerical worker, I joined a union drive with AFSCME seeking comparable wages to men for female-dominated jobs, and we were partially successful. In the mid-80’s our union participated in the historic Hormel strike in Minnesota. Later, I joined others in support of a local welfare rights organization,” she says.
