Securing our access to space before a lunatic blows it all up
Planning for when we get power back gives us hope by imagining a better world, and we will be better prepared for the moment when it comes. One key policy a progressive government can implement on day one is nationalizing SpaceX. It would bring a critical national security asset into government control and be a significant first step in clawing back power from oligarchs and giving it back to the people.
Any conversation about nationalizing SpaceX should be framed with the context that the federal government has subsidized its growth with at least $38B since its inception. Without those dollars the company would not exist. Combine that with the reality that SpaceX doesn’t pay taxes, and you could argue that putting the company under collective control is more a “deprivatization” since the capital is being reacquired rather than a “nationalization” where capital is (usually) acquired for the first time.
Next it’s worth clarifying the difference between nationalization under a legitimate democratic process and what Trump has done with his extortion of Intel to get a 10% cut. Nationalization means the people control the company. But when an autocrat carves out a share of a company and directs it to their own desire, that is not nationalization but rather something like a “personalization” of a company. That company then becomes subject to the will of one person instead of whatever market or regulatory forces directed it before. So nationalizing SpaceX would in fact have an opposite, pro-democracy, effect compared to what Trump has done to Intel.
So with the context of SpaceX existing thanks to government investment and the clarification about what exactly nationalization is, why SpaceX in particular? There are many other companies that are good candidates, right? Well it boils down to SpaceX being a critical national security asset currently owned by an erratic fascist, who uses the wealth, power, and notoriety of being its owner to degrade our democracy. Placing capabilities like Falcon rocket launch capacity and the Starlink network into the hands of the government both ensures our access to space and internet infrastructure while making an example out of the richest man in the world. It will take time to rebuild a system which is fairer to everyday people, and in the meantime other billionaires will have an example for what happens if they go rogue.
Sometimes nationalizing a company can be hard because it doesn’t cleanly fold into an existing government institution. That’s not the case here. NASA exists. Give Musk’s 42% to NASA and install a few high level leaders to begin the transition. Yes there will be attrition, but NASA is built well to operate existing programs and that’s all they have to do here.
To be very clear, the engineers and other employees at the company have done incredible work and most of their innovation could not have been done in the NASA environment which exists today. They should be compensated for the stock they own and encouraged to remain at the company. But the lesson in the NASA vs. SpaceX comparison is not that “government bad and private industry good” (in fact the opposite is often true); it’s that innovation is possible in many different contexts and we don’t need to have a Nazi-saluting billionaire as a byproduct of that innovation.
Regardless of how SpaceX ends up being nationalized, the main point here is that it needs to be. Its rockets and satellites and the engineers who build them are praiseworthy, but a system which only allows innovation at the cost of oligarchy is not a good system. As with any industry or company, we can build something better: in this case it’s a combination of SpaceX’s innovation, NASA’s reliability, and throughout it all the will of the people deciding how things are run.
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