Did Joe and Kamala Fumble Space?
This newsletter is my constitutional right.
By law, every American has to make the case that their pet issue explains the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. It is without pleasure that that I report the following:
Joe Biden came into the White House at a time when US space policy was firing on all cylinders. During Donald Trump’s first term, his administration had, among other things, re-established the dormant National Space Council; organized a hasty lunar return program at NASA, called Artemis; and created a new military service, the US Space Force. Moreover, a bipartisan group of lawmakers funded all of it, mainly to compete with the specter of China’s increasing ambitions in space.
This was largely enabled by the commercial revolution in space, the ecosystem and business models driven by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.
And notably, that ecosystem was largely created and proven out by NASA under Barack Obama, who enabled officials seeking a way out of the traditional restrictions on space policy (no money, the failing engineering culture inside the military-industrial complex) to funnel capital and technology to Musk and the start-ups that came in his wake.
Under Obama, SpaceX could be seen as a Democratic project: A space exploration company led by a climate-conscious techie, backed by California lawmakers and Silicon Valley (including, admittedly, Peter Thiel), and in opposition to the bipartisan space-industrial complex functionally represented by Republican majorities in the Senate (and specifically by Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama.)1 These were the years of Musk and Obama bro-ing out on the launch pad and having late-night White House meet-ups. SpaceX communications director James Gleeson, perhaps the last public relations person standing in Musk’s empire, was previously employed by Dr. Jill Biden!
So it is a bit strange, as a Musk biographer observed, that Biden didn’t embrace space world more as an economic engine and way to promote US technological superiority. It’s not that his administration halted anything—his appointees at NASA and the Space Force continued pushing a lot of money into industry. But the White House didn’t latch onto space as symbolic or important to the rest of its agenda, and that now appears to be a mistake.
It’s particular indictment of Kamala Harris, because the vice president is chair of the National Space Council, the interagency coordinating group that can be the nexus for US government space activity if it bothers to. Trump’s VP, Mike Pence, previously known for trying to cancel the Space Shuttle program as a member of Congress, shocked a lot of observers by putting time and energy into the National Space Council—probably he wanted to get out of the White House.
Harris did not spend much energy on space, nor did her staff. It’s always cringe when reporters complain about access, but the space policy officials in the Trump White House were much more engaged with the press about space than their Biden equivalents. It’s notable that the Trump appointed Jim Bridenstine, an ambitious, young (by Washington standards) former member of Congress to lead NASA, while Biden tapped former Senator Bill Nelson, born in 1942, mainly because they were long-time colleagues. Nelson certainly knows space, but it would be hard to find someone more symbolic of the status quo.
What does that matter for the election? Musk backing Trump might have been inevitable, but you can imagine a world where he didn’t create a personal passion project to help Trump win. It’s hard to say how meaningful his manipulation of Twitter and political spending actually was, but in a close election, keeping him on the sidelines might have helped get Harris over the top.
Musk is a very emotional person, and he’s admitted that part of his opposition to Biden is based on the White House’s weird refusal to acknowledge Tesla as an important player in the EV market. Anyone who has worked with Musk understands that managing his feelings is important, and this is what politicians (and Joe Biden specifically!) are supposed to be good at: Take the factory tour, tell him he’s doing a good job, hug him to death, and maybe you don’t become the latest target of his resentment.
Why didn’t that happen? Timing, mainly: Musk’s turn into online right-wing stuff accelerated during the pandemic ahead of Biden’s election. That’s also the same period when one of his children transitioned and broke off contact with him, an event that seems to have played a big part in his political evolution. In July 2022, Musk was saying that Trump should “ride off into the sunset,” but by the end of the year Musk’s hackneyed “Twitter files” production pulled Biden’s son Hunter back into the public spotlight, and personal animus probably precluded any political reconciliation.
There were substantial conflicts. I doubt Musk sympathizes with Democratic tax policy, but I don’t think it really drives him because he doesn’t pay much tax. He cares more about his companies: At Tesla, Musk was in pull-up-the-ladder mode, turning against Biden’s EV tax credits because they would benefit competitors playing catch-up to his firm. And all his firms face well-documented regulatory entanglements with an alphabet soup of federal agencies.
I can speak best to what’s happening at Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX has faced delays (often self-inflicted) to obtain the permits it needs to build a spaceport and launch its huge Starship rockets more often. It’s not a story of overly-restrictive regulation, but of slow-moving government working with the fastest-moving company on the planet. Permitting reform has supposedly been a top concern for the Biden administration, which by the way, is paying billions to develop Starship: Why not use those two facts to offer a coherent political vision of cutting red tape to create the future?
You saw a hint of what could be during Hurricane Helene, when SpaceX was trying to send planes full of Starlink satellite communication terminals to connect people in North Carolina, and Musk got upset that the government was (wisely) controlling the airspace as government agencies and the National Guard delivered aid. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg intervened to get things sorted out, to Musk’s apparent satisfaction.
The same thing hasn’t happened at the FAA, which issued a long-awaited environmental report last week saying that SpaceX should be able to launch 25 times year from its Texas spaceport. Musk fans attributed this win to Trump’s election, but the same document would have been issued weeks before if SpaceX had been more forthcoming about some water-permitting missteps. SpaceX has to jump through plenty of hoops, but the government is letting them build the spaceport because it is so important to Biden’s policies at both NASA and the Pentagon.
It’s hard to see it as anything other than political malpractice: Biden and his team boosted SpaceX without putting themselves in a position to take credit.2 And if the problem was the Biden-Musk relationship, the August switch to Harris as nominee could have been a perfect course correction, just as it was for Ben Horowitz—but she hadn’t invested enough time in her space portfolio to capitalize. Even if Musk wasn’t personally palatable, there was no reason Biden or Harris couldn’t have shown up to SpaceX launches, or celebrated the role of the rest of the commercial space sector in boosting Ukraine’s military and deterring China, guiding efforts to mitigate climate change, or just exploring the universe.
This was an incredibly close election, and any number of different decisions by the candidates might have led to a different result. But the Democrats’ specific failure to engage on space spotlights some of the general faults popping up in other post mortem reports:
Failing to communicate their principles through action: If the US wants to be a leader in [renewable energy/space], why isn’t the government pulling out all the stops?
Prioritizing purity over achievement: Elon’s views can be abhorrent, but wasn’t there some modus vivendi that would signal that Democrats can set aside differences to work on shared goals?
A strange reluctance to take credit that is their due: SpaceX (and space) is popular with young men who are drifting away from Democrats, but there is little effort to communicate the government’s role in SpaceX’s success under Democratic politicians.
Another way to tot up the score: SpaceX’s controversial, government-funded spaceport is in Cameron County, Texas, one of those border communities where right-trending Latino voters have puzzled and worried Democratic strategists. SpaceX’s investment in the high-tech rocket facility and disputes over what it can do there have received a lot of local attention. In 2020, the county’s voters went hard for Biden, with 56% backing him over Trump.
In 2024, Trump (and, you’d have to say, Musk) flipped the county, winning 52% of the vote.
Hey, WOW, sorry, this newsletter does not get written often enough, for good reasons (a healthy diet of freelance work, my three year-old) and bad reasons (procrastination). I am hoping to appear more frequently in your inbox in the months ahead.
Please don’t miss my most recent work: A New York Times feature about big robots fighting wildfires, and a Sherwood investigation into the secretive billionaire who made the biggest individual tax payment to the US government in modern times. You can also subscribe to Payload Space, the daily space newsletter featuring my reporting.
It wouldn’t be until Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 that the late Senator John McCain became SpaceX’s first real Republican backer, driven by rival ULA’s dependence on Russian-built rocket engines. His stance could be seen as prescient, given Starlink’s role in Ukraine’s defense, or ironic, given Musk’s current relationship with Putin.
This is the specific part of the piece where I’m just repeating my prior views, a requirement for the genre.