One of Elon Musk’s Starship rockets exploded over the Gulf of Mexico early yesterday evening, creating a spectacular fireworks-like display and disrupting commercial air traffic from Florida up through the eastern seaboard. Flight radar maps showed numerous commercial airliners in the eastern Caribbean scrambling to leave the debris zone. Starship is SpaceX’s new mega-rocket intended for missions to the moon and possibly Mars. I want to flag a couple details.
Musk had a running feud with former FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker and is generally believed to have helped force Whitaker into retirement when Donald Trump was sworn in in January, though the precise details are murky. Musk had claimed repeatedly that he was over-regulated by the FAA, especially after the agency fined SpaceX $633,000 for launching rockets with unapproved changes. He repeatedly called for Whitaker’s resignation and accused the FAA of “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” The FAA also had to fine Starlink for skirting safety regulations.
Musk has been in de facto control of the FAA through DOGE for the last six weeks. He appears to be on the verge of taking a major contract away from Verizon and giving it to his company Starlink, which is part of SpaceX, though the news on that front changes from day to day. As of today, Starlink says it doesn’t want to take Verizon’s contract. There’s been some journalistic questioning about what precise power Musk might be using to control FAA. But that misses the forest for the trees. For the last month, everyone in the federal government has known that defying DOGE is the way to be fired. As a mere illustration of Musk’s current de facto control, see this paragraph from the lead of a Bloomberg article.
Two weeks ago, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska showed up at the Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters in Washington to deliver what he described as a directive from his boss Elon Musk: The agency will immediately start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace system.
Malaska told those in attendance that the employees had up to 18 months to get the new program up and running, an unsettling timeline for aviation safety employees accustomed to a more deliberate pace. Anyone who impeded progress, Malaska said, would be reported to Musk and risked losing their job, according to two people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Now, another one of the Starship rockets blew up in January, causing another disruption of air traffic in the southeast. That was Starship Flight 7. But on Friday, February 28th, the FAA announced that it had issued SpaceX a new license to authorizing Starship Flight 8 despite the fact that the investigation into the January explosion was still ongoing.
Now maybe Whitacker was just terribly unreasonable. And maybe it made perfect sense to give the go-ahead for another Starship launch only a few weeks after the other explosion. But it seems very reasonable to ask whether Musk’s de facto control over the FAA has led to more lax oversight of his rocket launches. These questions are reasonable and inevitable when you’re in effect running the agency that regulates your rocket launches.
Again, the facts currently available don’t prove anything in themselves. But they raise more than enough questions to press for more information about who’s making decisions to keep the skies of the Caribbean safe, and whether reality-star-turned-Transportation-Secretary Sean Duffy is fulfilling his commitments to the American people.