As I write this, Elon Musk is the third-richest person on Earth, with a net worth estimated at $194.4 billion.*

Musk owns a company called SpaceX.

• SpaceX makes rockets and satellites, carries out launches (more than 300 over the past 15 years), and has become a fixture of the military-industrial complex.

• Every time SpaceX launches a rocket, air traffic controllers on the ground have to close the nearby airspace for hours, monitor for debris falling through the atmosphere, and determine when commercial and passenger aircraft can safely resume flying.

• It is a real burden on our nation’s critical — and already stretched-too-thin — air traffic controllers.

• One veteran air traffic controller says space launches are “similar to a hurricane making landfall” in terms of the additional work required.

• But neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk pay a dime for the air traffic controllers without whom their private, for-profit business would be grounded.

• Meanwhile, commercial airlines pay a fee — for every passenger on every flight — into a government fund that helps cover the cost of the Federal Aviation Administration and our nation’s critical air traffic control system.

• In other words, if you’ve ever flown, you’ve contributed more toward the invaluable services of the air traffic controllers who keep our skies safe than SpaceX has despite launching hundreds and hundreds of rockets into space.

President Biden has a proposal in his latest budget that would stop companies like SpaceX from freeloading on essential government resources and start making them pay their fair share for maintaining our nation’s air traffic infrastructure.

To President Joe Biden:

It is absurd that companies like SpaceX don’t have to pay a dime when they launch rockets through airspace that belongs to the American people, even though those launches strain our nation’s critical air traffic control system. Don’t give up on making for-profit companies like SpaceX pay their fair share for disrupting aviation and for consuming the limited resources of air traffic controllers.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For progress,

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen

*That’s according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If there are so many billionaires whose fortunes are increasing so rapidly that there’s a “need” to track their wealth in real time, our priorities as a society may be out of whack.
 
 
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