Get the latest tech news
Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. Can Anyone Stop Him?
With SpaceX and Starlink, Elon Musk controls more than half the world’s rocket launches and thousands of internet satellites. That amounts to immense geopolitical power.
Musk and now-legendary rocket engineer Tom Mueller broke through, in part, by being scrappy: They’d swap NASA’s $1,500 latches for ones made for bathroom stalls that cost just $30, and they’d use commercial air conditioners for the Falcon 9’s payload bay rather than buy a cooling system for an estimated $3 million. When Musk felt others didn’t share that vision, he sued, like the time he alleged that the Air Force had acted illegally when it gave the era’s space monopolist, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin called United Launch Alliance, an $11 billion contract for 36 rocket cores. The Trump White House hit tiny Lesotho with crushing 50 percent tariffs; the country then quickly licensed Starlink as a way of demonstrating “goodwill and intent to welcome US businesses,” according to a State Department memo obtained by The Washington Post.
Or read this on Wired
