Robert Reich, former Labor secretary under President Bill Clinton and current public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is angry with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Reich has written a column in the UK Guardian explaining why he finds Musk obnoxious and what should be done about it.
Most of what Reich suggests is of dubious legality (such as threatening to arrest Musk). His suggestion that the United States government cut all ties to SpaceX would be an unmitigated disaster for NASA and the U.S. military.
Imagine a world without SpaceX. The current revolution in commercial space travel would not have taken place. Elon Musk’s rocket company is wildly successful because it has provided launch services that are not only more reliable but degrees of magnitude cheaper than previous rocket companies were able to achieve.
The main reason that the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches are so inexpensive is that the company has solved the reusability problem. The first stages of these rockets return to drone ships or onshore landing zones to be refurbished and relaunched. Except for one recent failure, SpaceX has routinely been landing Falcon’s first stages for several years.
Without SpaceX, the Starliner astronauts, now stuck on the International Space Station, would be faced with the stark choice between a risky return on the spaceship they flew into space in or begging for a ride home on a Russian Soyuz.
Without SpaceX and the in-development Starship rocket, America would not return astronauts to the moon anytime soon. China would likely be the next nation to accomplish that feat.
Without SpaceX, there would be no prospect for private space stations, a moon base, or Elon Musk’s dream of a city on Mars.
Commercial space flights such as Jared Isaacman’s Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn would be pipe dreams. Starlink, which promises to bind the world together in a telecommunications web, would be pie in the sky. The military would have a harder time securing space from foreign enemies.
What about Reich’s complaints about Musk concerning SpaceX? Reich suggests that SpaceX is a monopoly by “cornering the launch market” and that its rockets “were responsible for two-thirds of flights from U.S. launch sites in 2022 and handled 88 percent in the first six months of this year.”
SpaceX dominates commercial space with its highly reliable, inexpensive Falcon rockets. But it does not behave like a monopoly. It is not charging excessive prices for shoddy goods and services. SpaceX does have competitors, such as Rocket Lab and, soon, Blue Origin when its New Glenn starts to fly,
Reich also claims “Musk’s mercurial, impulsive temperament makes him and the companies he heads unreliable.” Musk himself has admitted to having Asperger’s, a form of autism. Several years ago, then NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was obliged to remind Musk that he needed to concentrate on the Crew Dragon and not the Starship to satisfy SpaceX’s contractual obligations to NASA.
Eric Berger expressed the worry in his upcoming book, “Reentry” about the development of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy., that Musk’s eccentricities might someday get the better of him, as happened to the aviation pioneer Howard Hughes.
No evidence exists that Musk’s mental health will compromise national security or send him spiraling into true madness. Properly managed, as Bridenstine proved, Musk remains a valuable asset to the U.S. and the world.
Finally, Reich notes that Musk once denied Ukraine the use of his Starlink system to support efforts to attack Russian units in Crimea. Musk was being prudent by not involving himself directly in an armed conflict with Vladimir Putin in violation of American law, as Musk himself explained in a recent X post. In any case, Musk made a deal with the Pentagon to provide Starlink services to Ukraine, leaving him without direct involvement.
Reich is not a cranky troll on social media. He is a former cabinet secretary and a university professor. The UK Guardian is a respected newspaper read on both sides of the Atlantic. Those two facts make his opinions all the more astonishing.
One should be careful about proposing to ruin a man financially and even deprive him of his freedom for reasons that seem dubious at best and outrageous at worst. That is especially true when, by doing so, one would damage the national security and economic vitality of the U.S. to the detriment of all humankind.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.