The Man Who Controls Space: How Elon Musk’s Dominance Extends From Launch Pads to Global Warfare
A stone’s throw from the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, a Cape Canaveral hotel’s rooftop bar keeps its doors open long after dark. The bartender slides shots across the counter and cranks up the volume on Ozzy Osbourne. It’s 11:37 p.m. on a sweltering July night in central Florida, when every person in the crowd snaps their head north at once. Twelve miles up the Banana River, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off, its bright orange exhaust plume cutting sharp through the dark sky. Right on cue, the opening riff of Iron Man blares over the speakers.
For the two dozen of us gathered there, it’s a thrilling novelty. When the deep thud of the rocket’s sonic boom reaches us, nearly everyone whoops in excitement. But for Elon Musk, this is just another Tuesday. This lift-off marked SpaceX’s 95th launch of the year—an average of almost one mission every other day. That’s more successful launches into orbit than every other space-faring nation and company on Earth, combined.
On this specific night, the Falcon 9 carried 28 Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. Starlink, of course, is another of Musk’s space ventures that has left all its rivals in the dust. His satellite constellation numbers more than 8,000 working satellites; the closest competitor, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, operates just 630, and each one delivers less than a tenth of the bandwidth of a single Starlink unit. Amazon has poured massive resources into its own competing satellite internet service, Project Kuiper, which is led by a former SpaceX satellite executive. Federal license terms require Kuiper to get 1,600 satellites into orbit by mid-2026. To date, Amazon’s constellation has only 102 satellites in operation.
Even with these stark numbers, it’s difficult to fully measure the geopolitical clout Musk now holds through his two dominant space companies. When Starlink suffered a multi-hour outage in late July, troops on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war lost connectivity to their drones—and to each other. “Everyone thought the impact was limited to the front lines, until reports poured in that the outage was global,” a Ukrainian officer stationed near Kupiansk along the Oskil River in eastern Ukraine texted me. That’s how central Musk has become to modern warfare. Just two days after the launch I watched from the hotel rooftop, another Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, this time carrying four astronauts in a Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Dragon is currently the only vehicle the U.S. has to send humans to space, a fact Musk didn’t hesitate to remind his one-time ally Donald Trump of when the president threatened to cut off his government contracts.
Now, Musk is positioned to turn his dominance over rockets and satellites into a third, far more consequential source of power. For the first time in decades, the U.S. is openly pursuing the weaponization of space, responding to what the Pentagon says are growing threats from Russia and China. The Pentagon is already investing in maneuverable spacecraft designed to approach and disable or destroy other nations’ satellites. Separately, the current president has committed $175 billion to a program that could eventually field hundreds of orbiting missile interceptors, plus thousands more communications satellites to coordinate their operations.
It’s unlikely Musk’s companies will build the actual offensive weapons themselves. But launching those weapons into orbit and enabling them to communicate securely with each other? That’s squarely SpaceX’s area of expertise. So even though Musk no longer has the unfettered access to the Oval Office he enjoyed early in the current administration, there’s no scenario this massive military space build-up doesn’t massively benefit SpaceX. The only open question is: how much? When the U.S. fields its new fleet of orbiting weapons, how many of the key access codes will end up in Elon Musk’s pocket?
Most people have grown somewhat numb to the staggering control billionaires now exert over daily life. But anyone who has watched Musk bulldoze his way through global politics and policy—even as his companies pull off engineering feats that would have read like pure science fiction a generation ago—can see what’s at stake if he is given an outsize role in weaponizing space. (SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
“The U.S. government relies on him extremely heavily,” Victoria Samson, head of space security at the Secure World Foundation, told me. “Even before the last election, I was asking U.S. space officials: ‘You’ve tied yourself to an incredibly volatile, unpredictable person. Doesn’t that worry you?’”
I. Rockets
As recently as the early 2010s, accessing space was an incredibly slow and expensive proposition. The U.S. carried out fewer than 20 launches a year, and launch costs topped $10,000 per kilogram of payload. Musk and legendary rocket engineer Tom Mueller upended the industry in part through scrappy, no-frills innovation: they swapped out NASA’s custom $1,500 latches for $30 off-the-shelf latches made for bathroom stalls, and used commercial off-the-shelf air conditioners to cool the Falcon 9’s payload bay instead of purchasing a custom-built cooling system that would have cost an estimated $3 million.
Though Musk has carefully cultivated an anti-establishment public image, he has always been a master of playing Washington’s political game. He built alliances with like-minded officials in government, including then-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who pushed for cheaper, more accessible access to low Earth orbit, the region of space starting around 100 miles above sea level. When Musk felt other industry and government insiders were blocking his vision, he didn’t hesitate to sue. He famously filed a legal challenge claiming the U.S. Air Force had acted improperly when it awarded an $11 billion contract for 36 rocket cores to United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that held a monopoly on U.S. government space launches at the time.
When the lawsuit didn’t deliver immediate results, Musk leaned into nationalist sentiment. Months earlier, in February 2014, Russia had invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea, drawing global condemnation of Moscow. Musk rode that wave of outrage to successfully push Congress and the Obama administration to phase out ULA’s workhorse Atlas V rocket, which relied on Russian-made RD-180 engines. (The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court.) This one-two punch broke ULA’s stranglehold on government space launch contracts.
SpaceX’s next big breakthrough came in 2017, when the company began reusing first-stage rocket cores, a move that slashed the cost of reaching orbit. (Eight years later, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy remain the only rockets in their weight classes with fully reusable first stages.) But no innovation has been more critical to SpaceX’s success than the Merlin engine, refined over years by Mueller. It has become one of the most reliable and durable engines in aerospace history, even though “it’s terrible on paper when it comes to performance,” as one former SpaceX employee told me. Its raw power and fuel efficiency are unremarkable by industry standards. “We didn’t have the budget to do hundreds of rounds of design and analysis,” the former employee explained. “So we just tested the hell out of the engine. We hot-fired it thousands of times. What we ended up with is an engine that’s incredibly tough and reliable.”
Today, thanks in large part to its nine reusable Merlin engines, a Falcon 9 can launch one kilogram of payload into low Earth orbit for just a third of the industry’s previous average cost; the Falcon Heavy, which uses 27 Merlin engines, cuts that cost nearly in half again. Roughly 85% of all Falcon 9 missions now launch with a previously flown first stage. In 2022, SpaceX ramped up from around 30 launches a year to more than 60, and last year it hit 138 successful launches. NASA’s entire launch and human exploration program is now almost entirely dependent on Musk’s company. A whole new commercial space economy has grown up around SpaceX, one that relies on the company’s low-cost access to orbit to deploy networks of small satellites. For example, satellite imaging firm Planet Labs has had hundreds of its small spacecraft launched by Falcon 9 rockets.
In truth, no major player is even trying to overtake SpaceX; most are just scrambling to carve out small niches in the Musk-dominated space ecosystem. ULA is now building rockets optimized for geostationary orbits much farther from Earth, even as most of its customers follow SpaceX’s lead and place their satellite constellations in closer low Earth orbit. Newer entrants like Rocket Lab and Firefly are widely praised for their technical creativity, but their operational rockets are tiny by SpaceX standards: the largest can carry just a couple thousand pounds of payload, compared to the Falcon Heavy’s 140,000-pound capacity.
“SpaceX is a cornerstone of the global space industry, and companies like Firefly are complementary,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim told me. “It’s like air, land, and sea transportation—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.” (This view is widely shared; Firefly recently went public at an $8.5 billion valuation, while Rocket Lab boasts a market capitalization of roughly $21 billion.)
Jeff Bezos has the financial resources to compete with Musk, and his rocket company Blue Origin has existed for a quarter century. But the firm has long had conflicting priorities. It has poured years of work into engine development, and its BE-4 engine actually powers the first stage of ULA’s new rocket—a twist that many find ironic. Blue Origin is best known for its suborbital tourism rocket, which recently carried Bezos’ wife Lauren Sánchez and pop star Katy Perry on a short trip to the edge of space. But the company’s heavy-lift rocket, the one designed to compete directly with SpaceX, has completed just one test flight. When I asked a Blue Origin spokesperson what makes the company’s rockets better, or even different, from Musk’s, he admitted: “I don’t have a solid answer for you on that.”
China, which once seemed poised to dominate the global launch market, has struggled to keep pace with SpaceX’s output. Over the past three years, China has successfully launched between 64 and 68 rockets a year. SpaceX not only launches twice as often, it also puts more than 10 times the total mass into orbit. Stoke Space, founded by former Blue Origin engineers, has generated buzz among aerospace enthusiasts, but it has yet to launch its first rocket. ULA, SpaceX’s original rival, has developed a powerful new rocket (more on that later), but Musk is still years ahead. He is currently developing a massive new launcher, arguably the largest ever built, with both stages designed to be fully reusable—delivering massive additional cost savings. By contrast, neither stage of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket is fully reusable. According to a recent report from SpaceNews Intelligence, this could leave the one-time monopoly “pushed into niche roles in government, regional, and backup contracts—if it survives at all.”
II. Satellites
At the end of May, at SpaceX’s Starbase factory in Texas, Musk was in full Mars evangelist mode. “This is where we will develop the technology needed to take humanity,” he told his workforce, “to another planet for the first time in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.”
But as he laid out his grand vision of a factory that would churn out 1,000 massive Starship rockets a year, he also acknowledged a far more practical reality. It’s not the inconsistent test record of the Starship that’s the biggest hurdle—it’s funding. “Starlink internet is what will pay for humanity to reach Mars,” he said.
The commercial launch business is notoriously unforgiving, and a launch program focused on reaching Mars is even more financially risky. Rockets explode, customers are often months late delivering their satellites, and margins are razor thin. But satellite internet service? That’s a far more reliable source of steady revenue. So in 2015, Musk began recruiting engineers to build a global internet network in orbit.
Large geostationary satellites have delivered internet service from 22,000 miles above Earth since the mid-1990s. The idea of replacing these with a constellation of small, low-altitude, low-latency satellites has been around for just as long. But it wasn’t until SpaceX cut the cost of reaching orbit that these plans became not just technically feasible, but massively profitable. According to Payload Research, SpaceX earned an estimated $13 billion in total revenue last year, with roughly $8 billion of that coming from Starlink. Around 70% of all SpaceX launches so far in 2025 have carried Starlink satellites into orbit. Starlink, which began launching satellites in 2019, now reports more than 6 million customers globally, a nearly 50% increase in just 12 months. This is why private SpaceX shares are among the most sought-after investments in the tech world. (That, and the fact that the company reportedly pays little to no tax on its massive revenue.) As of July, SpaceX is valued at $400 billion, with widespread rumors of an upcoming initial public offering. SpaceX’s overall market dominance now rests on Starlink.
It’s fair to say Starlink also generates the largest share of Musk’s global political influence. The deployment of Starlink terminals to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion is now well documented, as are Musk’s controversial decisions to reportedly cut off Starlink service over the Kherson region during a key Ukrainian counteroffensive, and block coverage near Russian naval ships docked in Crimea later that year. Reports of Iranian dissidents obtaining access to Starlink terminals date back to the same period.
On June 13 of this year, Iran’s government shut down domestic internet access after Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, an air campaign aimed at destabilizing and targeting Iran’s top leadership. That same day, right-wing U.S. pundit Mark Levin posted on X: “Elon Musk can put the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime by providing Starlink internet to the Iranian people!” Musk, a long-time ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, replied: “The beams are on.” Iran’s parliament quickly passed a law imposing up to two years in prison for anyone caught using unlicensed Starlink. Even so, local reports put the number of active Starlink users in Iran at more than 100,000 within weeks. Musk often allows unlicensed Starlink operation in countries that have not formally approved the service, a tactic that pressures governments to legalize the network. “But in Iran, they’re openly breaking the law,” one expert familiar with the situation told me. “They’re trying to overthrow the government by giving internet access and power to the regime’s opponents.”
This was not the first or last time Musk has used Starlink to advance Israeli government goals. As WIRED has previously reported, venture capitalists helped the Israel Defense Forces gain Starlink access after the October 7, 2023 attacks. Civilian access to Starlink in Gaza has reportedly been severely restricted ever since, with only one hospital granted an exception. Meanwhile, scam operations in Myanmar, jihadist networks in the Sahel, and rebel groups in Sudan have all reportedly retained more or less open access to Musk’s satellite network.
Musk has never shied away from using his technology to advance his own political agenda. We have already seen how his changes to X have made the platform more welcoming to far-right and neo-Nazi groups, and how his AI chatbot repeats baseless conspiracy theories about “white genocide.” We have seen Musk enable a war effort, and cut off that aid when it served his personal interests. All of this has happened while Starlink is still in its early stages, before its constellation is complete and before it offers full global coverage. The risks of over-reliance on Starlink have not been lost on geopolitical actors: while there are roughly 50,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine today, some of the most technologically advanced Ukrainian military units have already moved away from relying on Musk’s service. “Starlink isn’t our primary communications network, and sometimes it’s not even our backup—it’s just a contingency,” one Ukrainian officer based in the Kharkiv region told me.
European officials have discussed developing a homegrown competitor to Starlink, and the Chinese government is building two low Earth orbit constellations: one commercial for the global market, and one reserved for its military and intelligence agencies. Beijing plans to launch 28,000 communications satellites across the two networks by the 2030s. So far, China has launched only around 170 satellites for the project, and an alarming share of those have failed in orbit.
That leaves Amazon as Musk’s most credible potential competitor. The company has the financial resources to go the distance. Amazon recently completed a $140 million, 100,000-square-foot facility at the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral to prepare Kuiper satellites for launch. It has signed contracts for up to 83 launches with three different rocket companies, totaling several billion dollars in launch services, to put its entire Kuiper constellation into orbit. Almost half of those launches are booked with ULA, SpaceX’s original rival, which is building a new rocket integration facility near Cape Canaveral specifically to prepare Kuiper missions.
Amazon already has unmatched access to global consumers, of course. Kuiper is part of the same Amazon division that makes Ring cameras and Kindles, and its user terminals are designed to be smaller and cheaper than Starlink’s. But its biggest advantage may be Amazon Web Services’ vast global network of data centers. For businesses and security-focused government agencies, “AWS means we can offer customers private networking capabilities,” an Amazon spokesperson told me, allowing them to route their data entirely off the public internet.
But time is not on Kuiper’s side. A public beta test, originally scheduled for early 2024, has been pushed back to late 2025 or early 2026. The original terms of Kuiper’s Federal Communications Commission license require the company to launch 1,600 satellites by mid-2026. (Bezos’ recent close alignment with the Trump administration may give Kuiper room to renegotiate that deadline.) Either way, Kuiper doesn’t have the in-house rocket partnership that Starlink benefits from. Only one out of every eight of Kuiper’s contracted launches is booked to fly on Blue Origin rockets owned by Bezos, and Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket has only flown once. SpaceX is so unconcerned about Kuiper as a competitor that it recently carried two Kuiper satellites on a mid-August Falcon 9 mission, and has two more Kuiper launches booked.
Today, Starlink’s 8,000-plus active satellites deliver a total bandwidth of 45