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HOW NASA ENGINEERED ITS OWN DECLINE  
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Franklin Foer
July 28, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it
ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk. _

, Photo-illustration by Fernando Pino*

 

In the beginning, there was the name. A prophet guided Errol Musk to
bestow it on his eldest son, or so he claimed. The seer was Wernher
von Braun, a German engineer and an inspiration for Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Though von Braun had built missiles for
Hitler and used concentration-camp prisoners for manual labor, the
U.S. government recruited him, and eventually brought him to a base in
Alabama and tasked him with sending men into orbit, then to the moon.

Von Braun had always dreamed of venturing deeper into the galaxy. Back
in 1949, before he emerged as the godfather of the American space
program, he spilled his fantasies onto the page, in a novel
titled_ Project Mars
[[link removed]]_. He described
how a new form of government would take hold on the red planet: a
technocracy capable of the biggest and boldest things. At the helm of
this Martian state would sit a supreme leader, known as the Elon.

Whatever the truth of this origin story, Elon Musk has seized on von
Braun’s prophecy as his destiny. Since the founding of SpaceX in
2002, his business decisions and political calculations have been made
with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human
species to a new homeland, a planet millions of miles away, where
colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate
change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will
inevitably crush life on Earth. Far away from the old, broken planet,
a libertarian utopia will flourish, under the beneficent sway of the
Elon.

This sense of destiny led Musk on October 5, 2024, to a Trump rally in
western Pennsylvania. Wearing a gray T-shirt bearing the
slogan OCCUPY MARS, Musk told the crowd that Trump “must win to
preserve democracy in America.” Thanks to their alliance, Musk
briefly achieved powers that few unelected Americans have ever
possessed. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency,
he demolished large swaths of the federal government
[[link removed]] and
began to remake the infrastructure of the state. For a few erratic
months, he assumed the role of the terrestrial Elon.

Five months into Trump’s second term, Musk’s inflated sense of his
place in history clashed with the ego of his benefactor, the
relationship ruptured, and each man threatened to ruin the other. Musk
vowed that his spaceships would no longer carry Americans, or the
supplies that sustain them, to the International Space Station. Trump
threatened SpaceX’s federal contracts
[[link removed]], reportedly worth
$22 billion. Weeks later, they were still bludgeoning each other. In
July, Trump mused that he might deport the South African–born Musk,
who in turn impishly announced that he would bankroll a new third
party.

Both men are likely bluffing. Musk still needs the U.S. government to
fund his grand designs. And the U.S. government very much needs Elon
Musk.

Last year, 95 percent of the rockets launched in the United States
were launched by SpaceX. NASA was a mere passenger
[[link removed]].
Musk has crowded low Earth orbit with satellites (nearly 8,000) that
are becoming indispensable to the military’s capacity to communicate
and the government’s surveillance of hostile powers. Even if Trump
had pushed to dislodge Musk, he couldn’t. No rival could readily
replace the services his companies provide.

Read: American spaceflight is now in Elon Musk’s hands
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That Musk has superseded NASA is a very American parable. A generation
ago, NASA was the crown jewel of the U.S. government. It was created
in 1958 to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life,
and it succeeded brilliantly. In the course of landing humans on the
lunar surface, NASA became the symbol of America’s competence and
swagger, of how it—alone among the nations of the Earth—inhabited
the future. NASA’s astronauts were 20th-century cowboys, admired in
corners of the world that usually abhorred Americans. The Apollo crews
traveled to the heavens on behalf of “all mankind,” a phrase that
appeared both in the act that created NASA and on the plaque left on
the moon by Apollo 11. Even NASA’s engineers, with their skinny ties
and rolled-up sleeves, became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

The rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. In his novel, Project Mars, he
imagined humans traveling to the red planet. (Evening Standard /
Getty)

NASA was born at the height of liberalism’s faith in government, and
its demise tracks the decline of that faith. As the United States lost
confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to
Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him. This
isn’t an instance of crony capitalism, but a tale about well-meaning
administrations, of both parties, pursuing grandiose ambitions without
the vision, competence, or funding to realize them.

If the highest goal of policy is efficiency, then all the money that
the government has spent on SpaceX makes sense. Even the company’s
most vituperative detractors acknowledge its engineering genius and
applaud its success in driving down launch expenses (unlike many
defense contractors, SpaceX largely eats the cost of its failures).
But in the course of bolstering Musk, in privatizing a public good,
the government has allowed one billionaire to hold excessive sway.
With the flick of a switch, he now has the power to shut down
constellations of satellites, to isolate a nation, to hobble the
operations of an entire army.

Because of Musk’s indispensability, his values have come to dominate
America’s aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old
NASA mission. Space was once a realm of cooperation, beyond commercial
interests and military pursuits. Now it is the site of military
brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to
plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has
been replaced by an obsession with rocket power. Musk wants to use his
influence to impose the improbable endeavor of Mars colonization on
the nation, enriching him as it depletes its own coffers. In the
vacuum left by a nation’s faded ambitions, Musk’s delusions of
destiny have taken hold.

NASA’s golden age emerged from fiasco.

John F. Kennedy campaigned for president promising a “New
Frontier,” but he didn’t really care about satellites or
astronauts. Just before he launched his campaign, he confided to one
scientist over drinks in Boston that he considered rockets a waste of
money. A few years later, during a conversation recorded in the White
House, he flatly admitted, “I’m not that interested in space.”

But by the third month of his presidency, Kennedy was drowning in
humiliation. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets hurled the cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin—or Gaga, as the international press adoringly called
him—into orbit for 108 minutes, the first human to journey into the
beyond. _The New York Times_ hailed it as evidence of “Soviet
superiority.” The impression of American incompetence deepened five
days later, when a CIA-backed army of exiles botched an invasion of
Cuba, a misadventure immortalized as the Bay of Pigs.

In his desperation to redirect the narrative, Kennedy abruptly became
an enthusiast for the most ambitious plan sitting on NASA’s shelf.
On April 21, shortly after his proxy army surrendered to the
Communists, Kennedy suffered a bruising press conference. In response
to a question about the relative inferiority of the American space
program, he riffed, “If we can get to the moon before the Russians,
then we should.”

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on his way to becoming the first man
to orbit the Earth (Bettmann / Getty)

A month later, Kennedy delivered an address to a joint session of
Congress that more formally launched the Apollo program. Even then, he
did so harboring private doubts about the price tag, perhaps stoked by
the fact that his own father considered his promise to land an
astronaut on the lunar surface by 1970 an appalling act of profligacy.
Joe Kennedy fumed, “Damn it, I taught Jack better than that.”

When Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: “We
choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal
will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and
skills.” He charged the American government with executing an
engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for
no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the
animating spirit of “New Frontier” liberalism.

From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is
threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment
Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible
payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest
with the Soviet Union. At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of
about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion,
somewhere north of $300 billion in today’s dollars.

On Kennedy’s own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The
legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole
new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management.
NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an
unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them
wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the
work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government
laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a
near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed
three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first
crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA’s relentless culture kept
pushing toward its goal.

Unlike the Soviets, who attempted to dictate public perceptions by
manically managing the images of their exploits, NASA made the risky
decision to allow its project to unfurl on live television. The Apollo
voyages made for the most gripping viewing in the history of the
medium. By one estimate, a fifth of the planet watched Neil
Armstrong’s moonwalk live, an especially astonishing number given
the limited global reach of television in 1969.

The space program then was a projection of prowess and
self-confidence. “Space was the platform from which the social
revolution of the 1960s was launched,” Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in
his memoir. “If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should
be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical
care for the aged.” Apollo was a model for planned social change and
technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow.

The savviest bureaucrats are hitmakers. Years before Armstrong
planted the American flag on the moon, NASA had begun prepping plans
for a sequel to Apollo. Only after the enchanted moment of the lunar
touchdown did the agency meet with Vice President Spiro Agnew to
unveil the next phase of America’s future in space. On August 4,
1969, 15 days after Armstrong’s giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon
administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars.

To nail the presentation, NASA brought von Braun, its most celebrated
engineer, to do the talking. After all, they were selling the vision
he had sketched in his novel decades earlier. By 1982, NASA said, it
hoped to land on Mars in two nuclear-powered planetary vehicles, each
carrying six crew members.

But in NASA’s moment of glory, von Braun and his colleagues
couldn’t restrain themselves. They added items to their wish list: a
lunar base, a space station, and a shuttle that would transport
humans. Pandering before the ego that NASA needed most in order to
realize its request, von Braun said he wanted to send Richard Nixon
into orbit as part of the nation’s celebration of its bicentennial,
in 1976.

Agnew loved it. Nixon did not. He must have despised the thought of
shoveling so much money into a program so closely associated with the
blessed memory of his old nemesis John Kennedy. Besides, the moment of
boundless technocracy was over, doomed by deficits and a sharp swerve
in the public mood. During the unending debacle of Vietnam, the public
had lost faith in grand ventures dreamed up by whiz kids. Meanwhile,
civil-rights leaders railed against the diversion of major
expenditures away from social programs. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni
popularized a term that captured the rising sourness: _moon-doggle_.

At a moment when Nixon was hoping to retrench, NASA proposed a program
with an annual cost that would eventually rise to $10 billion, carried
out over more than a decade—an expense far greater than Apollo’s.
Von Braun and his colleagues had badly misread the room.

President Richard Nixon and the Apollo 13 crewmen on April 18, 1970.
Nixon took a dim view of funding a trip to Mars. (Heritage Images /
Getty)

In the end, Nixon agreed to give NASA an annual budget of just over $3
billion, and he scythed away every component of the plan except for
the space station and the space shuttle, which was a reusable system
that promised to limit the costs of space travel. But a shuttle
traveling where? As Apollo wrapped up its final missions—and even
three of those were canceled—NASA no longer had a clear destination.

Many of the leaders who carried the agency through the space race,
including von Braun, began to depart for the private sector. During
Apollo, government engineers had been omnipresent, stationed in the
factories of its contractors; they mastered details. That changed in
the shuttle era, with its constricted budgets and diminished
expectations. Instead of micromanaging contractors, NASA began to
defer to them, giving aerospace corporations greater sway over vessel
design. In fact, it allowed them to own the underlying intellectual
property for the vehicles and their component parts.

Because the contractors understood the minutiae and they didn’t,
NASA officials grew reluctant to push for innovations, paralyzed by
the fear that they might be blamed for a contractor’s mistake. A
bureaucratic mindset took hold, first slowly, and then more
dramatically after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Freeman Dyson,
the visionary astrophysicist, drew a devastating distinction between
the “paper NASA,” largely a figment of memory and pop culture, and
the “real NASA,” the sclerotic organization that rose in its
place. Those criticisms were both legitimate and somewhat unfair; in
the shadow of crewed spaceflight, which garnered attention and
prestige, NASA pursued advances in robotics and astrophysics, such as
the Galileo mission to Jupiter. But without a human on board, those
accomplishments lacked the romance of NASA’s golden age.

In the summer of 2001, Elon Musk sat in a Manhattan hotel room, fired
up his laptop, and browsed NASA.gov. He had just returned from a party
on Long Island. On the ride home, he’d told a friend, “I’ve
always wanted to do something in space, but I don’t think there’s
anything that an individual can do.”

Musk was plenty rich and plenty bored. After a short stint as the CEO
of the company that became PayPal, he was ousted by its board,
although he remained its largest shareholder. He had bought a
Czechoslovakian military jet, which he’d spent hundreds of hours
flying, but that hardly held his attention. He was in search of his
next thing.

Musk grew up a fan of science fiction, steeped in the extraterrestrial
fantasies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The reality of space
exploration, however, wasn’t a subject that he’d studied closely,
until he scanned NASA’s site and had a revelation.

He assumed that he would read about impending missions to Mars. “I
figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we
must be about to go to Mars,” he told the biographer Walter
Isaacson. But no such plan existed, so he decided that it was his
mission to push humanity forward.

The thought made Musk something of a cliché. Space is a magnet for
rich dilettantes and—more than a sports car or yacht—the ultimate
expression of wealth and power. Because space travel is ingrained in
our culture as the hardest human endeavor, demanding immense
resources, it commands cultural respect. For Musk—who had been
bullied by both his schoolmates and his father—space offered the
possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his
greatness. A classic revenge fantasy.

Musk wasn’t wrong about the diminished state of NASA. Remarking on
the grim persistence of the space-shuttle program, Neil deGrasse
Tyson said that NASA’s flagship vessel
[[link removed]] “boldly
went where man had gone hundreds of times before”—135 times, to be
precise. These missions were essential to the construction of the
Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, but never
ventured beyond the familiar confines of low Earth orbit. Even as
Russia was losing the Cold War, it was winning the final chapters of
the space race, fielding a program that was better conceived and more
active. Indeed, when Musk first pondered launching rockets, he went to
Russia in hope of buying used ones; this entailed sitting through
vodka-drenched meals with apparatchiks hoping to bilk him. In the end,
he concluded that it was cheaper to make his own. In 2002, he founded
SpaceX.

Musk was a salesman, determined to make Washington turn its head—and
sink cash into his start-up, housed in a suburban–Los Angeles
warehouse, which was just beginning to cobble together its first
rockets. In 2003, he trucked a seven-story rocket to D.C. and parked
it outside the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Soon enough,
the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave
him several million dollars to help grow SpaceX. In 2006, NASA awarded
him $278 million for the first installment of a new program called
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. He received these grants
even though SpaceX hadn’t successfully launched a rocket. (Musk and
the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

For years, NASA had leaned on the same old set of big contractors:
Northrop Grumman, Rockwell, Boeing. These were stodgy firms, anchors
in the military-industrial complex, codependent on the government,
with their own bureaucracies. Their projects tended to swell in cost
and underperform. NASA officials knew these organization’s failings
and were desperate to reverse them. The shuttle program was scheduled
for imminent retirement, but what would replace it? There was still a
space station floating in low Earth orbit, with astronauts awaiting
resupply.

At the dawn of the 21st century, _disruption_ was the magic word,
incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a
matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy
idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the
scene to create companies that would shatter all the old models.

In 2010, Barack Obama canceled Constellation, George W. Bush’s
program for returning to the moon. NASA was getting out of the
business of owning spaceships and rockets—instead, it would rent
ones owned by private firms. When Obama visited the Kennedy Space
Center to announce this change in direction, he viewed one of Musk’s
Falcon 9 rockets, which was sitting on a launchpad. Photographers
captured the young president and the budding billionaire strolling
together, a passing of the torch to Musk.

Although he isn’t usually generous with sharing credit for his
successes, even Musk admits that the Obama administration rescued
SpaceX. Burning through cash and crashing test rockets, his company
was nearing collapse. But the change in policy opened a reservoir of
funds for him. At SpaceX’s bleakest moment, which Musk also
describes as “the worst year of my life,” NASA awarded it a $1.6
billion contract to carry cargo to the International Space Station. In
his state of relief and jubilation, Musk changed his computer password
to “ilovenasa.”

Of all the emerging firms in the age of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX
was the most deserving of success. Musk had an eye for engineering
talent, and he preached an audacious vision, which attracted young
idealists. Impatient, he questioned truisms and cut costs with
unrelenting intensity, even if it meant buying a tool on eBay to align
a rocket.

Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn’t triumph in this new age,
because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There
wasn’t a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit
design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a
limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately
prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created
Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply
Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business.

Starlink turned SpaceX into a behemoth. Because SpaceX was constantly
launching rockets—and not just for NASA—it kept gaining invaluable
new data and insights, which allowed it to produce cheaper, better
rockets. Because nothing is more exciting to an engineer than actually
launching things, the company drained talent from its competition.

Musk’s goal wasn’t to achieve the banal status of monopolist.
“The lens of getting to Mars has motivated _every_ SpaceX
decision,” Musk told Isaacson. When he created Starlink, he did so
because it would supply him with the capital to build rockets powerful
enough to carry humanity to Mars.

Musk, who describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” is not an
especially religious person. But his imagination is fixed on the end
of days—the possibility of an “extinction event”—because his
childhood experiences push his adult anxieties in the direction of the
catastrophic. In South Africa, he came of age amid the decaying of the
apartheid state, which had once promised to safeguard his racial
caste. His family, like his society, was fracturing. When he was 8,
his parents divorced. He now recalls his father as a monstrous figure.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has
done,” Musk once told _Rolling Stone_
[[link removed]].
(Errol Musk told _Rolling Stone_ that “he has never intentionally
threatened or hurt anyone,” and later said that his son’s comments
were about their political differences at the time.)

Given this turbulence—and the paucity of reliable authority in his
early life—it’s hardly surprising that Musk would fear the worst.
He found refuge from the world’s harsh realities in the pages of
sci-fi novels. But visions of apocalypse are the genre’s elemental
motif, and the fiction he devoured often magnified his dread.

Musk sought out works that offered both cause for despair and a vision
of transcendence. Those Asimov novels featured hyperrational heroes,
many of them engineers, who saved humanity by building space colonies
where civilization could begin anew. Musk borrowed his self-conception
from these protagonists.

From an early age, the colonization of Mars became Musk’s idée
fixe. At various points, he has described his companies as
contributing to that overarching mission. Tesla’s Cybertrucks are
vehicles that could be adapted to traverse the Martian terrain; its
solar panels, a potential energy source for a future colony. He has
even reportedly claimed that his social-media platform, X, could serve
as an experiment in decentralized governance—testing how a Martian
outpost might use consensus as the basis for lawmaking, because he
envisions a minimalist government on the red planet.

At SpaceX, Musk’s employees have begun sketching the contours of
life on Mars. One team is designing housing and communal spaces; Musk
has already named the first Martian city Terminus, after a planetary
colony in Asimov’s novels. Other teams are developing spacesuits
tailored to the planet’s harsh environment and exploring the
feasibility of human reproduction there. (When _The New York
Times_ reported on these teams
[[link removed]],
Musk denied their existence.)

No engineering challenge in human history rivals the audacity of
making Mars a place humans can call home. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s
president and chief operating officer, calls it a “fixer-upper”
planet, a hilarious understatement. Mars’s atmosphere is 95 percent
carbon dioxide and laced with nitrogen, among other elements and a
smattering of toxins. Temperatures can plunge to –225 degrees
Fahrenheit. My colleague Ross Andersen once memorably described what
would happen to a human body on Mars
[[link removed]]:
“If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your
eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your
blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds.” Even with
a suit, protection would be tenuous: Cosmic radiation would seep
through, and Martian dust storms—filled with abrasive, electrically
charged particles—could bypass seams and seals.

Read: To get to Mars, NASA might finally need to hire explorers
[[link removed]]

These impossible conditions are compounded by Mars’s distance from
Earth. Launches are feasible only about once every 26 months, when the
planets’ orbits align to minimize travel time and fuel requirements.
Even then, it takes roughly eight months for a spacecraft to reach
Mars, making it exceedingly difficult to resupply a colony or rescue
its inhabitants.

When challenged about these mortal dangers, Musk is disarmingly
relaxed, and has said that he himself would make the journey.
“People will probably die along the way, just as happened in the
settling of the United States,” he told Isaacson. “But it will be
incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the
world.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at the
Kennedy Space Center in March 2025. (Manuel Mazzanti / NurPhoto / AP)

To warm the planet, he proposes detonating nuclear bombs over Mars’s
poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect—an idea he
relishes, perhaps as a troll. SpaceX once sold T-shirts bearing the
slogan Nuke Mars. According to a top scientist at the Russian space
agency, Roscosmos, it would take more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped
missiles to carry out Musk’s plan. Even Wernher von Braun’s
fictional doppelgänger, Dr. Strangelove, might have winced at such
breezy talk of thermonuclear explosions.

President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of
cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to “bear any
burden.” But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is
seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his
own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from
any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the
plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth.

Musk’s fixation on Mars also functions as a kind of ancestor
worship, echoing a family mythology of flight from decline. In 1950,
his grandfather Joshua Haldeman left Canada for South Africa in search
of a freer society—one he believed could withstand the collapse of
Western civilization. Haldeman’s doomsday rhetoric
[[link removed]] railed
against Jewish bankers and “hordes of Coloured people,” whom he
claimed were being manipulated to destroy “White Christian
Civilization.” In the rise of apartheid, he saw not repression but
redemption, a last stand for the values he held sacred.

Read: Elon Musk’s anti-Semitic, apartheid-loving grandfather
[[link removed]]

Like his grandfather, Musk is obsessed with staving off civilizational
collapse. He does not voice his fears in openly racist terms—instead
framing them in the language of freedom and survival—but he is
fixated on the notion of a gene pool with diminishing intelligence.
“If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids,
that’s probably bad,” he told the biographer Ashlee Vance. His
rhetoric is provocative, but slippery enough to avoid outright
extremism.

Over years of statements, social-media posts, and interviews, however,
a pattern has emerged: Musk sees Mars not merely as a lifeboat but as
a laboratory—an opportunity to reengineer humanity. On a new planet,
far from Earth’s chaos and constraint, he imagines a society remade
in his own image.

This belief is rooted in a kind of technological social Darwinism, the
idea that evolution can be steered, or even upgraded, by engineering.
It’s how he describes an animating premise of Neuralink, the company
he co-founded that is developing brain-computer interfaces that aim to
merge human cognition with machines and effectively create a species
of cyborgs.

The same spirit infuses Musk’s obsession with procreation, and
he’s doing his part. He now has at least 14 children, by _The Wall
Street Journal _’s count
[[link removed]],
with four biological mothers. In his worldview, apocalypse and
salvation converge: Either we become a race of engineered brilliance,
or we vanish, and Mars is the greatest opportunity for remaking
humanity. In a sense, it follows a classic pattern of migration. The
bold depart in search of opportunity, while those who remain face
extinction. Survival becomes a test of worth. Those who stay behind
will, by their inaction, mark themselves as unfit for the future.

Once settlers arrive on Mars, Musk has suggested that life
forms—possibly including humans—might be bioengineered to survive
the planet’s harsh environment. In one interview
[[link removed]], he noted that
humanity has long shaped organisms “by sort of selective
breeding.” Humans, he intimated, could be bred like cows. He’s
reportedly prepared to supply his own genetic material to the effort.
Sources told the _Times_ that Musk has offered to donate his sperm
to help seed a Martian colony (which Musk later denied).

Using a concept borrowed from Asimov’s fiction, Musk says that
Martian colonists will serve as “the light of consciousness.” They
are humanity’s last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could
follow Earth’s destruction. But what’s dark is his vision of
abandoning Earth and investing the species’ faith in a self-selected
elite, one that mirrors Musk’s own values, and perhaps even his
traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old
NASA ideal: for all mankind.

In the earliest hours of a spring morning, I drove across a Florida
causeway, through a nature reserve filled with alligators and wild
boars, to hallowed ground: Launch Complex 39A, once a stage for
NASA’s majesty.

More than half a century ago, Apollo 11 began its ascent to the moon
here. During the space race, it was perhaps the most exciting place on
the planet, poised between glory and disaster: 11 Apollo missions
lifted off from here, followed by 82 space-shuttle launches. NASA
framed 39A for the television era: an enormous American flag
fluttering at one end of the horizon, a giant digital countdown clock
at the other. Even now, a weathered CBS News sign hangs on a small
cinder-block building with a perfect view of the site—the same spot
where Walter Cronkite once narrated liftoffs in his authoritative
baritone.

By 2013, the launchpad had become an expensive, unused relic, but
because of its presence on the National Register of Historic Places,
it couldn’t be torn down. Musk coveted the site, as did his longtime
competitor, Jeff Bezos. But at the time, Bezos didn’t have a rocket
capable of flying from 39A. SpaceX won the rights to lease the
launchpad for the next 20 years. The old theater of American dreams
now belonged to Musk.

I arrived at 39A to watch the launch of Falcon 9—SpaceX’s
workhorse rocket, the height of a 20-story building—which would help
deliver cargo to the International Space Station, circling in low
Earth orbit. There’s no alternative to the Falcon 9, and there’s
no rival to SpaceX. For the time being, the company is the only
domestic entity, public or private, with the capacity to deliver crew
and cargo to the space station.

Lyndon Johnson once said that “control of space means control of the
world.” In his day, space was a way to project national strength to
a global audience through displays of technical superiority. Today, it
has become a domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, and air. Modern
combat operations rely on space-based systems that guide munitions,
coordinate communications, and spy on adversaries. Without dominance
in orbit, terrestrial forces would be deaf, blind, and largely
immobile. In 2019, then, the Pentagon created the Space Force as the
sixth branch of the military.

If space is power, then Musk’s role is badly understated. It’s no
longer accurate to call him merely the world’s richest earthling.
The United States is now dependent on him in its quest to command
space. Through its Starshield division, SpaceX provides space-based
communication for the U.S. armed forces; its satellites can
reportedly track hypersonic and ballistic missiles
[[link removed]] and
extend the government’s surveillance reach to nearly every corner of
the globe. In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX a majority of its
contracts for a batch of national-security missions over the coming
years.

Some of this work involves agencies such as the National
Reconnaissance Office, placing it within the penumbra of
classification. The true extent of the government’s reliance on
SpaceX is largely obscured, rarely scrutinized, and only loosely
regulated. Yet the dependency is undeniable. If Musk were to withhold
support—out of principle, pique, or profit motive—the government
could find itself stranded. None of SpaceX’s competitors yet
possesses the capability to replace it. (A Space Force spokesperson
said that it relies on “a number of industry partners,” including
SpaceX, and continues to seek “to broaden the diversity of potential
vendors,” adding that the Department of Defense “exercises
rigorous oversight” of its contracts. The spokesperson also denied
claims that SpaceX’s satellites track missiles.)

The war in Ukraine has offered a chilling glimpse of the risks posed
by Musk’s role as interstellar gatekeeper. In the early days of the
invasion, SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals,
helping to replace communications systems debilitated by Russian
cyberattacks and advancing troops. It was a noble gesture and a
strategic boon. Ukrainian forces, empowered by the new technology,
coordinated scrappy, asymmetrical tactics that blunted Russian
advances.

But Musk’s commitment soon wavered. In September 2022, SpaceX denied
a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, effectively
blocking a planned strike on Russian naval forces in Sevastopol.
(Starting that fall, Musk began speaking with Vladimir Putin
[[link removed]] at
length, according to the _Journal_, troubling the U.S. intelligence
community.) In the months that followed, the company imposed new
geographic limits on Starlink’s use, restricting its application in
areas where Ukraine might otherwise target Russia’s vulnerabilities.
Musk framed the move as an act of prudent restraint that would help
avert World War III. But it also exposed an unsettling reality:
Ukraine’s battlefield operations were subject to the discretion of
a single person
[[link removed]].
“My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he
posted on X. “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it
off.”

Musk’s preeminence marks a profound shift in the history of American
political economy. During the Cold War, the military-industrial
complex was driven by corporations that operated as handmaidens to the
state. They had outsize influence, but remained largely bureaucratic,
gray-flannel institutions—cogs in a sprawling, profitable machine.
Musk is different. Years of hagiographic media coverage and his
immense social-media reach birthed legions of fanboys and nurtured a
cult of personality. His achievements command awe.

Photo-illustration by Fernando Pino

In the damp Florida night, I stood on a sandbank and trained my eyes
on Launch Complex 39A as the countdown clock ticked toward zero. And
then, without the benefit of Cronkite’s narration, I watched the
Falcon 9 violently part the darkness, with a payload bound for the
space station. A few minutes later, a light appeared in the sky: The
reusable rocket was returning home. Majestic and imperious, it cast a
warm glow over the palm trees.

For a moment this spring, Musk’s grand ambitions seemed like they
might buckle. In Washington, it had long been assumed that Musk and
Trump would turn on each other. When it finally happened, the spark,
fittingly, was NASA. Musk had pushed to install his friend Jared
Isaacman
[[link removed]] as
head of the agency—a move that stank of cronyism. In 2021, Isaacman,
a tech entrepreneur, had paid SpaceX millions to chase a childhood
dream of flying to space. That deal soon led to a friendship, and
eventually, his company owning a stake in SpaceX itself.

Read: MAGA goes to Mars
[[link removed]]

When Trump soured on Musk, he struck where it hurt most. Annoyed after
learning of Isaacman’s past donations to Democratic campaigns, the
president withdrew the nomination on May 31. Musk received the move as
one in a string of betrayals and erupted online, warning that the
Jeffrey Epstein files would implicate Trump and that the president’s
spending bill was a “disgusting abomination.” The clash soon
shifted to space. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft
resupplying the International Space Station; Trump blustered that he
would order a review of SpaceX’s government contracts.

Yet for all the rancor, there is no sign that SpaceX has actually
suffered. Trump and Musk have dismembered the federal bureaucracy, but
its old tendencies are still prevailing; the apparatus clings to the
vendors that have delivered results. Even as Trump raged,
Washington’s dependence on Musk was growing. In June, a Space Force
commander said that SpaceX will play a crucial part in the MILNET
program
[[link removed]],
a new constellation of 480-plus satellites. Reportedly, the Pentagon
will pay for it; the intelligence community will oversee it; Musk will
run it.

In its proposed 2026 budget, the Trump administration moved to
bankroll Musk’s deeper ambitions, albeit with a fraction of the
gargantuan sum required. Trump has proposed spending $1 billion to
accelerate a mission to Mars and fund the design of spacesuits,
landing systems, and other technologies that would make a voyage
feasible.

The money spent on human space exploration will be pried from NASA’s
other programs, even as the agency’s total budget is set to shrink
by nearly 25 percent and its workforce by one-third. To fulfill
Musk’s cosmic destiny, the administration is gutting NASA’s
broader scientific mission—the thing that NASA does best. (When
asked about this shift, a NASA spokesperson described “leading the
way in human exploration of our solar system” as the agency’s
“core mission,” and added that it is “contributing to a
competitive market that will increase commercial innovation.”) Human
spaceflight has floundered for decades, haunted by its inability to
replicate its greatest achievements and whipsawed by changing
presidential priorities. And the importance of astronauts to the
enterprise of exploration, which was always questionable, has further
diminished as the quality of robots has improved.

At the same time, and without attracting the same kind of fanfare,
NASA continues to display extraordinary acumen in science; its
research initiatives are arguably the most profound ventures in all of
government. They address the greatest mysteries in the universe: How
did life begin? Are we alone in the cosmos?

The government—so often viewed as a soul-sapping bureaucracy—has
helped supply answers to these most spiritual of questions. In the
late 1980s and early ’90s, the Cosmic Background Explorer provided
empirical support for the Big Bang theory. In 2020, after the
OSIRIS-REx probe reached the asteroid Bennu, it collected a sample
from a type of primordial projectile thought to have delivered
life’s building blocks to early Earth. Using the Hubble Space
Telescope, NASA helped determine the age of the universe, affirmed the
existence of dark energy, and extended humanity’s gaze into distant
galaxies and black holes. By capturing light from galaxies as they
existed more than 13 billion years ago, one of NASA’s telescopes has
effectively peered into the universe’s distant past.

For all of Musk’s mockery of NASA’s supposed lack of ambition, the
agency had already mounted a daring campaign to explore Mars—albeit
with robots, not settlers. Over the decades, it sent a fleet of rovers
(Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance) to wander the plains of
the red planet, drilling into rock and searching for ancient traces of
water and life.

NASA’s lenses point inward as well as outward. Its satellites have
documented the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of
forests, alerting humanity to the planet’s precarity. Unlike the
technological spin-offs NASA often touts to Congress to justify its
existence, these discoveries aren’t fleeting breakthroughs in
applied engineering. They are the path to humanity’s
self-knowledge—discoveries that private firms will never pursue,
because their value can’t be monetized.

Put differently, Trump’s budget is a cultural document. It reflects
a shift in public values. Not so long ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan
shaped how Americans thought about space. He did so through elegant
books and his television series, _Cosmos_, which reached an estimated
500 million viewers worldwide. At its core, his project was to extol
the virtues of the scientific method, which requires and promotes
skepticism and humility—a way of thinking that could help society
resist the lure of authoritarianism. He exuded wonder, a value he
hoped to cultivate in Americans, and harkened back to the humanism of
the Enlightenment, which was unfussy about the boundaries between
philosophy and science.

Every time I see Musk, I think of Sagan—because Musk is his
opposite. He is a creature not of science but of engineering. He owes
his fortune to the brute force of his rockets, and the awe they
inspire. There’s nothing humble about his manner. Rather than
celebrate the fragile, improvised nature of human existence, Musk
seeks to optimize or overwrite it—in the name of evolution, in
pursuit of profit, in the vainglorious fulfillment of his adolescent
fantasies. Where Sagan envisioned cooperation, Musk embodies the
triumph of the individual. Where Sagan cautioned against the
unintended consequences of technology, Musk charges headlong into the
next disruption. That rush will eventually sweep away many of the old
strictures confining him.

For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has mulled missions to
Mars and never mustered the political will to fund one. Elon Musk is
doing just that. SpaceX is planning to launch its first uncrewed
mission to Mars—neither funded nor formally sanctioned by NASA—in
late 2026, timed for planetary alignment.

Musk himself pegs the odds of hitting that 2026 window at 50–50. His
history of theatrics and unmet deadlines suggests that those odds may
be overstated. But this is more than bluster. He is building the most
powerful rocket in human history, testing it at a relentless pace, and
forcing it toward viability through sheer will. However speculative
his timelines, they point to a plausible destination: the day when
Musk escapes the gravitational pull of the U.S. government.

The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he
reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called
SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest
ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the
creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a
force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part
of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of
liberation.

_* Lead image sources (_clockwise from bottom left_): NASA; Corbis /
Getty; Gianluigi Guercia / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Alex Brandon / AP_

_1_ _Image sources: NASA; Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Bill Ingalls /
NASA / Getty; Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty; Marvin Joseph / _The
Washington Post_ / Getty_

_This article appears in the September 2025
[[link removed]] print edition
with the headline “The Man Who Ate NASA.”_

Franklin Foer [[link removed]] is
a staff writer at _The Atlantic_.

When the founders of _The Atlantic_ gathered in Boston in the spring
of 1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable
for the kind of reader who was deeply engaged with the most
consequential issues of the day. The men and women who created this
magazine had an overarching, prophetic vision—they were fierce
opponents of slavery—but they were also moved to overcome what they
saw as the limits of partisanship, believing that the free exchange of
ideas across ideological lines was crucial to the great American
experiment. Their goal was to publish the most urgent essays, the most
vital literature; they wanted to pursue truth and disrupt consensus
without regard for party or clique.  

Here is the mission statement published in the very first issue
of _The Atlantic_, in November 1857, and signed by many of the greats
of American letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne:

FIRST: In Literature, to leave no province unrepresented, so that
while each number will contain articles of an abstract and permanent
value, it will also be found that the healthy appetite of the mind for
entertainment in its various forms of Narrative, Wit, and Humor, will
not go uncared for. The publishers wish to say, also, that while
native writers will receive the most solid encouragement, and will be
mainly relied on to fill the pages of The Atlantic, they will not
hesitate to draw from the foreign sources at their command, as
occasion may require, relying rather on the competency of an author to
treat a particular subject, than on any other claim whatever. In this
way they hope to make their Periodical welcome wherever the English
tongue is spoken or read.

SECOND: In the term Art they intend to include the whole domain of
aesthetics, and hope gradually to make this critical department a true
and fearless representative of Art, in all its various branches,
without any regard to prejudice, whether personal or national, or to
private considerations of what kind soever.

THIRD: In Politics, The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or
clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its
conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with
persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that
moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which
alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It
will not rank itself with any sect of anties, but with that body of
men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor,
whether public or private.

In studying this original mission statement, we came to understand
that its themes are timeless. The core principles of the founders are
core principles for us: reason should always guide opinion; ideas have
consequences, sometimes world-historical consequences; the knowledge
we have about the world is partial and provisional, and subject to
analysis, scrutiny, and revision.

_Give a Gift -- Give a year of independent, fact-checked journalism
from THE ATLANTIC. [[link removed]]_

Reporting the truth takes work -- and your support.

* NASA
[[link removed]]
* Elon Musk
[[link removed]]
* Werner von Braun
[[link removed]]
* rockets
[[link removed]]
* space
[[link removed]]
* aerospace and defense contracts
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Mars
[[link removed]]

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