Elon Musk and SpaceX are big winners in the expenditure plan of Donald J. Trump 2026.
President Trump supplies Mr. Musk on both NASA and the Pentagon to reorient the federal editions of space in a way that will probably manage billions of dollars in new companies at the Musk’s Space Technology Company, and the congress signs the budget plan.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Trump calls for a huge leap in the expenditure, an extraordinary increase of 13 percent, almost entirely due to allocations in a conference insurance plan of the congress budget.
The leap would happen, while many other federal agencies would be reduced, partly to increase federal expenses in two areas SpaceX is positioned to win: A huge rocketing weather system and space emissions for Mars and the Moon.
Mr. Trump has proposed a Golden Dome Defense System to follow rockets and kill on his way to American goals, possibly sent by China, Russia, Noord -Korea or other rivals.
Pentagon officials say that SpaceX is probably supposed to be the best receiver of this eruption of new editions, which can only generate billions of dollars in new contracts for SpaceX.
That is because SpaceX produces both rockets that can launch military loads in a track and satellite systems that can supply the supervision and targeting aids that are needed for the project, for which the largest military investments are needed that the United States have ever made in space.
Mr. Trump’s budget plan also calls for an unknown but large amount of new money for “American space control to strengthen American national security.”
SpaceX is already by far the largest recipient of Pentagon’s expenditure on existing military communication systems with low earthbit and it gets the largest cut of Pentagon Rocket launch contracts. The approval of the congress for the plan to considerably expand these expenses would be a huge victory for Mr. Musk and SpaceX.
Mr. Trump’s proposed budget calls for Pentagon’s expenditure before 2026 to be $ 113 billion larger than this year. But that increase would be entirely from the allocations that the congress is considering through his reconciliation plan for the tax year of 2025, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former director of the space, who pointed out A footnote in Mr.’s plan. Trump.
NASA’s budget is confronted with the general cuts in Mr Trump’s plan, but there are elevations that largely match the own priorities of SpaceX.
The spending plan goes after the commercial rivals of Mr. Musk and calls on NASA to abolish the financing for the Space Launch System, a rocket program led by Boeing, and also the Orion Astronaut Capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, which was part of three planned flights to bring people back to the moon.
Instead, Mr Trump’s budget calls for ‘more cost -effective commercial systems that would support ambitious subsequent lunar missions’, an industry that now dominates SpaceX. The Blue Origin of Jeff Bezos, who has developed his own new rocket, could also be a large beneficiary of this shift, said industrial managers on Friday.
The NASA budget also requires $ 1 billion in new editions to concentrate on a mission to Mars, which the primary driving force for Mr. Musk has been with SpaceX for the first time since he first started. He is already building a new rocket, called Starship, to try to deliver this plan.
“The handprints of SpaceX are all about this,” said Mo Islam, a co-founder of CargoA news site of the commercial space. “I don’t see that there is another way to look at it. SpaceX is positioned as the primary beneficiary of the majority of these budgetary movements.”
There are some items in the NASA budget that can lead to decreases in issuing SpaceX, such as fewer expenditures at the international space station, where SpaceX supplies both freight and astronauts.
But SpaceX will probably still appear the winner. It recently won a contract of $ 843 million To “dispose of” the space station When it will be retired in 2030. And Mr. Musk has Mr. Trump encouraged to accelerate that retirement date.
“The decision is up to the president, but my recommendation is as soon as possible”, Mr. Musk written On his social media platform, X, in February.
In the tax year 2024, SpaceX has $ 3.8 billion in federal contracts, most of NASA and the Pentagon. In the past decade, the company has taken a total of $ 18 billion in federal contracts, according to an analysis of the New York Times of federal contract data.
The scale of the new government company expects SpaceX – that was clearly begun Based on policy shifts, Mr. Trump has made since January – asked questions from Democrats in Washington. They have wondered if Mr. Musk, who has published more than a quarter of a billion dollars To support Mr Trump’s last presidential campaign, his political contributions and his position as top advisor of the White House cash in.
Experts have long argued that NASA is too focused on an over-budget and rear-Schedule moon program called Artemis, in particular the parts of the effort that depend on Boeing and Lockheed.
“It has all affected this with a suspect of incorrect influence,” said Mr. Harrison. “Even if these are legitimate questions.”
- Advertisement -