The Decade-Plus Successes Of SpaceX And U.S. Space Programs

Authored by Forrest Marion via RealClearDefense,

In recent days, domestic terrorists have engaged in political violence against Elon Musk’s Tesla enterprise: torching cars, vandalizing dealerships, and more. Leftist political leaders have employed the same kind of rhetoric against Mr. Musk that, during last year’s campaign, encouraged two assassination attempts against President Trump. Apparently, the ongoing violence against Tesla and the personal threats against the former darling of the Democrats are for no other reasons than Musk’s willingness to lead the Trump 47 administration’s attempts to curb the long-running and insanely wasteful, fraudulent, and corrupt federal spending that threatens the country with fiscal and economic ruin. In short, Musk is doing his best to halt Social Security payments to “eligible” recipients who are, literally, older than Moses (Deuteronomy 34:7).  

These developments are timely for recalling Elon Musk’s accomplishments a decade or more ago, which have proven indispensable to advancing his adopted country’s space capabilities and in the process bringing benefits to many millions of Americans as well as to earthlings all over the globe. 

I’m fully aware that the documented record of the 2010s is ancient history for many. So this piece seeks to lay out the historical record plainly and concisely.

In the latter part of the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009), the space shuttle program was expected to end by 2010. As a result, America’s hopes for returning her astronauts to the moon by 2020 rested on the Lockheed and Boeing contracted Constellation program. But as the incoming Barak Obama administration took stock in 2009, the Constellation program’s unsustainability became apparent. It was two years behind schedule and well over budget. In 2010 the Obama space team judged the Constellation program “unexecutable.” Obama cancelled it along with the shuttle program despite the furor of some former astronauts, most notably Neil Armstrong. (Developments since 2010 strongly suggest that Obama made the right call on the cancellation, albeit having no more than a modest interest in space.)

Enter those whom author Christian Davenport called “the Space Barons” in his fine book by the same title. The U.S. government’s civil and National Security Space (NSS) programs needed fresh thinking and simpler processes to attract young entrepreneurs willing to take risks that the large, legacy contractors could not or refused to take. Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin were the two up-and-coming space enterprises that most notably entered the field. And they produced.

SpaceX had achieved orbit with its Falcon rocket in late 2008. Over the next several years, Musk’s company continued improving its capabilities and cost effectiveness in terms of space transportation. One unforgettable moment in that evolution occurred in December 2015 when on a mission to fly eleven commercial satellites into orbit, SpaceX not only succeeded with the satellite mission but on the back end managed to land the Falcon 9’s first stage booster safely—the company’s first-ever successful landing of a first stage rocket. It was only the second such landing, as Blue Origin had done it only a month earlier on a suborbital launch. The pandemonium at SpaceX headquarters that night reminded many of Apollo 11 in 1969. The door was now opened to huge cost savings in commercial space as well as NSS missions. It was a game changer. 

In a meeting with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter at the Pentagon in June 2016, Musk and the defense chief discussed innovation. (Note that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon earlier in 2025 was not his first meeting with a U.S. defense secretary.) More important, in the spring of 2016 SpaceX secured its first U.S. Air Force contract to fly NSS satellites into space. Led by Musk and Bezos, the “NewSpace actors” – as Obama had called them – were gaining prominence and partnering more closely than before with NSS interests.

Without the leadership of Musk and Bezos a decade ago, U.S. civil space and NSS might look much different than it does today. And for any Tesla-attacking terrorists who want to show the rest of us the strength of their convictions against Elon Musk, all they need to do is throw away their cell phones, shred their credit cards, and turn off their cars’ navigation systems – all of which depend on satellite capabilities, much of it thanks to Musk’s SpaceX.    

Forrest L. Marion, Ph.D., is a retired military historian. The author of four military histories, his most recent work is Standing Up Space Force: The Road to the Nation’s Sixth Armed Service (Naval Institute Press, 2023).