A snippet:

Musk was poised to have even more on top of that, after spending immense capital to elect the president and then join his government.

In the first weeks and months of 2025, his friends at the Trump State Department tried to strong-arm nations like Gambia into buying Starlink. The Trump White House hit tiny Lesotho with crushing 50 percent tariffs; the country then quickly licensed Starlink as a way of demonstrating “goodwill and intent to welcome US businesses,” according to a State Department memo obtained by The Washington Post. Vietnam, Bangladesh, and India all quickly made similar deals after stalled negotiations. American diplomats promote American businesses all the time, but this was something different. “If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” Kristofer Harrison, a former State and Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration, told ProPublica. “Because it is corruption.”

Jared Isaacman—who reportedly paid SpaceX $200 million for a private space trip—was initially lined up to run NASA. The president, in his inaugural address, seemed to send a love note to Musk by promising to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” In March, the Trump Commerce Department rewrote the rules for a $42 billion broadband program that make it harder for wired networks to get grants—and easier for satellite providers like Starlink to do so. (Musk is already pushing the states of Louisiana and Virginia to give him more money.) The Trump Pentagon, already tilting in Musk’s direction, leaned even heavier that way. It reportedly floated the idea of yanking funding for one of its more sensitive satellite communications networks and handing billions of dollars to a Musk-built constellation instead. That’s on top of the billions the Defense Department has committed to “Star-shield,” its private, military-grade version of Starlink.

But all of that is peanuts, potentially, compared to Trump’s pursuit of a “Golden Dome” over America, which would allegedly protect it from ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles all at once. Trump picked the top general from the Space Force to lead it and promised that such a defense would include “space-based sensors and interceptors.” That would make it a reboot of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense boondoggle—but with better tech to detect targets, and AI to coordinate the interceptors. Some experts think that gives it a better chance of working this time around—as long as the US deploys thousands of weapons in space.

Jeff