Alan MacLeod- With billions in defense contracts, Musk’s SpaceX is helping turn Trump’s nuclear vision into reality, threatening to dismantle decades of global nuclear deterrence.
Unfortunately the evidence is clear, Musk founded SpaceX not to go to Mars, but for Wars. The company was founded in 2002 with Heritage Foundation* cronies to achieve mass lift to Low Earth Orbit via reusable boosters, just as Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative originally intended with the DC-X program.
Starlink, their psuedo-profitable internet service, has a main value proposition as the orbital constellation groundwork for Brilliant Pebbles[1]. They already have a name for it, StarSHIELD, led internally at SpaceX by a 4-star General Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy. Starship now is barely plausible[2] for Mars (thanks to Elon's design steers), but is optimized for this heavy lift task to lower orbit needed to scale up Starlink and StarSHIELD. Pebbles-style constellations orbit low to be able to promptly strike targets on Earth, the low latency for internet aspect is more of a convenient side benefit.
Unfortunately the evidence is clear, Musk founded SpaceX not to go to Mars, but for Wars. The company was founded in 2002 with Heritage Foundation* cronies to achieve mass lift to Low Earth Orbit via reusable boosters, just as Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative originally intended with the DC-X program.
Starlink, their psuedo-profitable internet service, has a main value proposition as the orbital constellation groundwork for Brilliant Pebbles[1]. They already have a name for it, StarSHIELD, led internally at SpaceX by a 4-star General Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy. Starship now is barely plausible[2] for Mars (thanks to Elon's design steers), but is optimized for this heavy lift task to lower orbit needed to scale up Starlink and StarSHIELD. Pebbles-style constellations orbit low to be able to promptly strike targets on Earth, the low latency for internet aspect is more of a convenient side benefit.
Griffin was an original Strategic Defense Initiative architect. Read his bio and you'll see Elon has been working on this with him for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:text=Elon
*Yes Heritage Foundation is the same org that developed Reagan's Star Wars / SDI in the '80s and more recently wrote Project 2025.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54012-0