Hello again, dear Readers and Listeners,
The rhythm of federal staff purges has continued to tear apart small-stakes, but important, agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and NASA, leaving the larger departments, where the big money resides, in a state of chaos-induced paralysis, according to reports and my sources.
Is it a coincidence that on February 14, the very date the New York Times, Comcast (NBC), NPR, and Politico were told to be out of their Pentagon workspaces, Reuters reported that Elon Musk’s DOGE Bros showed up at the Department of Defense?
It is believed that Musk’s company SpaceX, a space transportation and communications company, has defense contracts worth billions of dollars. SpaceX’s CEO Gwen Shotwell has said SpaceX has roughly $22b in U.S. government contracts, approximately $15b of which are with NASA.
The DOGE Bros are at NASA, where it is strongly believed that mass firings of probationary employees will begin on Tuesday, February 18, according to NASA Watch. It is probably safe to conclude that the majority of these employees represent the nation’s young scientific talent.
Across the Potomac River at the Defense Department, it is hard to pin down the value of SpaceX’s defense contracts, again according to Reuters, because most of these contracts are believed to be for classified programs. The Wall Street Journal reported on a $1.8b classified program last year. So the rough math puts the value of DoD contracts, which includes programs like National Security Space Launch, at more than $5b, according to ABC News.
What is not paralyzed is work on the subject of this week’s episode: The Iron Dome for America executive order. As I wrote two week’s ago, Trump’s “Iron Dome” executive order, like President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), is a technically challenging and very expensive proposition, that could cost as much as $27B to develop, build, and launch.
The Missile Defense Agency is gearing up to host an Industry Day meeting on Tuesday, February 18, to work with the U.S. space and defense industries to identify “innovative missile defense technologies (system-level, component level, and upgrades), architectures, concepts, and Concept of Operations (CONOPS) to detect and defeat the threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks.”
The Space Development Agency, which falls under the U.S. Space Force, launched a parallel effort on Wednesday, February 12. That’s agency issued a call for “Executive Summaries to perform 60-day studies on a U.S. “Iron Dome” architecture and capability.”
What’s in this episode
The Department of Defense has less than six weeks to submit a plan for how it will build and launch the “Iron Dome for America”, President Donald Trump’s concept of a mostly space-based missile defense shield. The DOD is reaching out to industry for ideas, but what should the technology priorities be?
Who’s in this episode
Roger Lenard, a NASA and DOD consultant, and a Strategic Defense Initiative veteran, who led the classified Timber Wind Nuclear Rocket program, and the Lightweight Exoatmospheric Projectile (LEAP) program
Peter Garretson, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, and co-Author of the book “The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy”
Reading
Tariffs
“China Is at the Heart of Trump Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum” - Keith Bradsher, New York Times, February 10, 2025
Space General
“Bezos' Blue Origin to layoff about 10% across its space, launch business” - By Joey Roulette, Reuters, February 13, 2025
“DEI, DOA: How the defense industry is racing to bury its diversity efforts” - Valerie Insinna and Michael Marrow, Breaking Defense, February 13, 2025. You can read my January 27, 2025 newsletter, which broke this story here. It details how The Aerospace Corporation removed its DEI page on the morning of Saturday, January 25, 2025.
DOGE Bros
“Cutting moon rocket would test Musk's power to slash jobs in Republican states” - Reuters, February 12, 2025
“State Department halts plan to buy $400M worth of armored vehicles from Musk’s Tesla” - Adriana Gomez Licon, AP, February 13, 2025
“The US Treasury Claimed DOGE Technologist Didn’t Have ‘Write Access’ When He Actually Did” - Wired, February 6
Updated, more extensive, and detailed, “Who’s working for Elon Musk’s DOGE?” - Yeganeh Torbati, Rachel Lerman, Todd C. Frankel, and Faiz Siddiqui, Washington Post, February 14, 2025
Ad Astra!
Laura
