Reuters World News - Starship's next test and Musk's space vision

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Elon Musk has stepped away from DOGE. His ninth Starship test flight could launch as early as next week, with a speech by Musk laying out his priorities for SpaceX. Space correspondent Joey Roulette joins the podcast to explore Musk's celestial ambitions and what SpaceX means to the world - and beyond.  Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠here⁠. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠here⁠. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new space race is taking shape and Elon Musk is leading the way. Three, two, one, into full power and lift off. Next week could see the latest Starship test flight, if the FAA gives SpaceX the green light, which as of this recording was still an open question. Musk says he'll give a speech laying out his vision for SpaceX. So on this special episode, we talked to our space reporter about this man and this company and what it all means for national security, the world, and beyond. I'm your host, Jonah Green.

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, you may have heard of him, said he was stepping away from his role overseeing the Department of Government efficiency, as protests around the world have hurt his bottom line, especially at Tesla. But SpaceX is a different beast. To talk about all of this is space reporter Joey Rulette. Hey, Joey. Hello. Can you explain what a space reporter does?

It sounds exotic. Yeah, yeah. Well, Space Reporter wakes up and it goes to space. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. I covered all things space, kind of except the astronomy side. Our colleague Will Dunham does,

but I mainly cover the businesses like SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, and the policy, which is NASA and what NASA is doing and what the Pentagon is thinking about space. And there's a lot happening. So there's just a lot of contours to that. Yes, and we're going to talk about it all today. But first, do you go to these launches when they happen? I wish.

I haven't seen a starship launch, although I've been down there to see the starship without launching. Yeah. But if Musk gives his talk this week and it launches and SpaceX opens up. media accreditation that I'd fly down there to see it. That'd be cool. Yeah. So what is it that is happening next week, assuming he gets the go-ahead to launch? Where are we in the SpaceX program? It's in a really interesting phase right now. This would be Starship's ninth launch, and it'll be interesting because it'll be the first launch since two explosions. The last two test launches of Starship ended early in flight with explosive mishaps that kind of signaled a set

fact and major engineering challenges that SpaceX needs to address. So from an engineering perspective, this is going to be an important launch. But then also Elon Musk said that he plans to give an update on Starbase and the Mars plan prior to launch, which were kind of due for an update to see kind of like what might have changed in his strategy. He does these talks every few years. The last one he did was in 2022 down in Boko Chica at the Star Ship. site. This time around, though, there's a lot of things that are different, right? Elon is much

closer to the president of the United States. And Starship plays a central role in the U.S. space program, even more so than it did last year or under the Biden administration. You know, Starship for years has been the one that's going to land humans on the moon under the U.S. Artemis program. But now under Trump, there's this huge shift to focus more on Mars. And that is largely because of Elon Musk's involvement in the Trump world. So the U.S. space agenda has changed significantly and is putting even more of a reliance on SpaceX and particularly Starship. So with these looming changes to the U.S. space program, which we haven't really heard much details about, we'll see what Musk has to say. I think, you know, usually when Musk gives these updates, people kind of take them with a grain of salt,

because there are these lofty goals. He'll say all these dates and timeline projections that don't always match reality. But what's more interesting this time, of course, is whether his statements will reflect the actual trajectory of the U.S. space program, given his proximity to the presidential administration. And this is the first big speech that pertains to his company since he's kind of stepped away from Doge. Before all this, what was his relationship to the government as a private entity? Even before Trump, SpaceX, had a very, very close relationship with the government. I mean, they are an incredibly efficient company, and they build products, spacecraft, rockets, faster than any of its competitors at a lower price for the government. So that's

incredibly attractive to the Pentagon, to NASA. And years and years ago, those agencies took notice and they started investing more on SpaceX and buying its services because for the missions that they want, which were largely inspired by the capabilities SpaceX provides, SpaceX can execute it. And they happen to be the only ones who could execute it in that way. They're by far the main launch provider for the Pentagon for NASA and its science missions. They ferry astronaut crews to and from the International Space Station for NASA, including cargo. And they were picked by NASA to use Starship to land humans on the moon in like 20, 27, but that'll likely be later. And that, that relationship continues to grow. The dependence on SpaceX continues to grow, despite concerns that

the Pentagon has had at times that it's relying too much on a single provider. Has the relationship between SpaceX and NASA changed since Trump took office? Yeah, well, SpaceX kind of pioneered this strategy shift at NASA, maybe like a decade, a little more than a decade ago. That means where NASA used to send missions to space using spacecraft that it owned, now it's using spacecraft that companies owned and NASA's buying rides on the spacecraft. And that's in part to bring the costs down and to stimulate a commercial marketplace for space flight services, which NASA says will ultimately bring costs down even further. And so the difference here is what we're seeing is like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop, they all had crucial roles in the Apollo program and

the private companies, of course, but they were building spacecraft for NASA that NASA would own and control and decide how to use it. In this case, SpaceX has its crew dragon spacecraft, for example. That's the primary U.S. ride to and from the ISS. But NASA doesn't own it. SpaceX does. SpaceX is on contract with NASA to basically sell seats to NASA for its astronauts to go up and down the ISS. There are other billionaires apart from Elon Musk and other aerospace companies that are vying for these contracts, right? Where are the blue origins or the Boeing's in this kind of space race? Is SpaceX just blowing them out of the water at this point? I mean, in some areas, yes. When we talk about Boeing, SpaceX is kind of blowing them out of the

water in terms of the crew dragon and Starliner competition. Starliner is basically Boeing's equivalent to crew dragon. It was developed under the same program, but it's years delayed and pretty famous last year when Butch and Sunny, the astronauts and the ISS, had to stay there because of problems with Starliner and Crew Dragon had to bring them home instead. So in that regard, SpaceX is leagues ahead of Boeing. But there's another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, who we all know. And his company, Blue Origin, is also kind of racing just behind SpaceX. They definitely don't have nearly as much experience in space as SpaceX does. But they're getting there. They have their new Glenn Rocket, which is going to be a competitor to SpaceX's Starship and it's Falcon 9. They want to

launch commercial missions to space. They want to launch NASA missions to space. They already have a contract with NASA to launch a pair of spacecraft. But we just haven't seen Blue Origin move at the speed that SpaceX moves. In terms of government contracts, SpaceX is also the frontrunner to build President Donald Trump's Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield. What do we know about that program? It's very interesting. The whole idea of Golden Dome has existed for decades, but I think, you know, the people who are planning it now realize that it's now possible to build largely because of SpaceX's Starlink system. That's a giant internet communications network in space, totaling 7,300 satellites and counting now. And my colleague, Mike Stone and Marissa Taylor, they reported that SpaceX and Palantir and Andral are seen as the front runners in this new competition to build Golden Dome. for the U.S. government. Golden Dome is a missile defense shield. It's going to be just like a starlink in low Earth orbit, but capable of taking out hypersonic missiles that launch from other countries. And they can do that. It's supposed to be designed to do that either using lasers or actual missiles.

So these satellites are going to carry missiles and shoot them at these hypersonic missiles launching from Earth to intercept them before they reach the United States. That's the concept. It's extremely controversial. And it's controversial that we're going to let Elon Musk put missiles in his satellites. For that, for Elon's involvement, yes, but also just the concept itself is controversial from an international treaty perspective. Sure. From a nuclear deterrent instability perspective, from a physics perspective, people question whether that's actually going to work. And from a cost perspective. I think some of the estimates we've heard like $25 to $35 billion, that is like wildly underestimated, some will argue. People say that it could cost as much as one trillion or more

to build this system. So it's very controversial. And when the Reagan administration years ago first wanted to have such a system, that was estimated to cost about $1 trillion. But part of the reason that failed was because of concerns from other countries that it could be used to kill other satellites, not just missiles, but also because it was so costly and because we didn't have the capacity to launch that many satellites into space in a viable way. But now we do, because of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and because of its production capacity with Starlink, the U.S. now thinks that it's time to build Golden Dome. So let's talk about Starlink. You can look up to the night sky sometimes and you could see a bunch of stars in perfect formation and they're kind of

traveling along a straight line. Those are Starlink satellites. Are they not? They could be aliens. They could be aliens. Anything could always be aliens. No, but those are most likely Starlink satellites because like freshly launched Starlink satellites will appear like that in the sky. You've seen probably social media videos of people freaking out and asking what is that.

But yeah, there's really no other company or government deploying satellites. that except China, but we haven't seen similar trains as they call them in the night sky. But usually when you see that phenomenon it is SpaceX and just after they deploy Starlink satellites. So what they're doing is they're raising their orbit. So they're going a little further into space and they're going to park into their positions in this giant mesh network. And coming off the rocket, of course, they're kind of bundled together at first, but they slowly separate and widen out. And that's the train. as they're getting into formation.

What is the main focus of Starlink? What is it for? How does it make money? I think we see reports that X country has opened up to Starlink and now they have internet. How does this all work? Yeah, so Starlink began as a plan to provide internet and rural places for communities that don't have access to the internet or to sell service. That was kind of the altruistic goal of it, right?

and when it was announced, I think sometime around 2017 it was announced. The idea seemed crazy to a lot of people at the time, launching that many satellites. I think the filings indicated they wanted to launch 42,000 satellites, which is not the actual number that just kind of gives them the regulatory wiggle room, but it's getting very big right now. It's at 7,300. And so it seemed crazy at the time to launch that many satellites, because traditionally satellites are these big, singular objects

that costs hundreds of millions, billions of dollars. You launch it up into space, far out into space, in a way that it can track and follow the location on Earth. And that would be that single satellite that could do a bunch of different things. But that era has gone now because Starlink has proved itself capable of providing similar services like internet communications,

earth imaging, as they're doing on classified programs with intelligence agencies at much quicker speeds because it's in low Earth orbit, where satellites orbit Earth once every 90 minutes. And so to have a communication system in low orbit, you need to have a mesh system. So you need to have a giant blanket, effectively, of satellites covering the whole globe

that can kind of talk to each other using laser lengths so that you can have a consistent beam of communications or a consistent signal with terminals on Earth. And that's what SpaceX has done quite successfully. and it has really changed the game. It has really kind of upended the traditional satellite communications market. It has led the Pentagon to rethink how it collects intelligence from space and aids battles on Earth. It, of course, played a major role in the Ukraine war, especially in the first year.

There was a lot of controversy about Musk's control over the system. But yeah, Starlink really disrupted the traditional satellite industry. And it's poised to disrupt telecom in general. The money for that comes from where? There's different markets that Starlink serves, right? It's the consumer broadband, and that's kind of what SpaceX has targeted the most. So if I want to connect to the internet, but I live out in some region area of the world, I can order a terminal from Starlink, which would just be like a big magazine-sized dish that I just set up.

I plug it in, and I plug it to a router, and I instantly have Wi-Fi that is top. to the satellites, you know, hundreds of miles above in space. And that's kind of the business model. And that is a big chunk of customers that SpaceX has served. They also serve businesses like cruise, ships, airlines, and they serve governments. They have this whole other government unit called Star Shield, which relies on the Starlink network, but provides more secure services and other types of satellites that SpaceX will launch themselves for more specific use cases. And so the revenue that Starlink has brought in recently was estimated to have finally eclipsed the revenue from all other SpaceX lines of business.

So it's a very, very important unit to SpaceX overall. And Musk's kind of grand plan with it is that revenue from Starlink will help fund the development of Starship, which is the kind of central pillar of Musk's dream to colonize Mars. What are the concerns over Starlink? I mean, Musk has so much power. He has such a broad footprint technologically. What are the concerns from those who perhaps don't trust Elon Musk in regards to this kind of vast satellite network? What SpaceX is doing is something that only governments used to do in the past. So now of a private company doing very risky, very important things tethered to U.S. national security

and the national security of other countries, too. Yeah. It's a private company, privately owned by Elon Musk, who I think has a 42% stake in it. And again, it's very tethered to his worldview. And the Ukraine war in particular was a very interesting example of a private company's role, particularly Elon Musk's role in a global conflict. And the controversy there was that he could turn off the internet for Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield. Right. There were concerns that he was controlling how Starlink was used in Ukraine. And particularly, There was one moment, as was reported in Walter Isaacson's biography, that he refused Ukrainian troops plea to activate Starlink over the Russian-occupied Crimea Peninsula to wage

an attack on Russian naval fleets. And Elon said no, basically, because he was concerned that it would escalate the war into World War III and for Russia to use nuclear weapons. But that just raised a lot of alarms across Europe. You know, what Musk says a lot is that he was concerned about starting a nuclear war or that Starlink would play a role in that. When you reach out to SpaceX and Musk for comment, what do they say about all this? SpaceX almost never replies to requests for comment, so it's really hard to, you know, know, know what they think about this or how they would specifically respond to our questions. Now, you are a space reporter, as we've established.

Do you envision that you'll go to space at some point once they make private space travel more accessible, assuming Katie Perry gives up her seat? If Reuters wants to pay for that, yeah, I would definitely get a space. Depends on which vehicle. Yeah. I mean, there's a risk, variable risk with each vehicle. Okay, okay. Good to know. Thanks again to Joey for his time and expertise. You can follow along with all of our.

in-depth musk-related reporting at reuters.com or on the Reuters app. Reuters World News is produced by Gail Issa, David Spencer, Sharon Reich Garson, Kim Vanel, Christopher Waljasper, and me, Jonah Green. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmons. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretzer. Sound design and musical composition by Josh Summer. This episode was engineered by Christopher Wall Jasper. To never miss an episode, make sure to click follow

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