A month ago I
wrote that a Chinese friend of mine who is an English-Mandarin practice buddy with me mentioned that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire. I pointed out that many rich and powerful people in the West (particularly in the U.S.) have skillfully constructed a set of larger-than-life myths and narratives around their own supposed awesomeness, and that too many people in the rest of the world have fallen for these myths and narratives. I'd like to suggest that the reality of both Musk and of his notional wealth is far less impressive than the myth. Musk is a major mouthpiece of aspirational propaganda, boasting that he is a self-made man who earned his wealth solely by means of his own vast capabilities and intelligence. (Oh, if only you imitate and emulate his "atomic habits", you too can become just as rich! Or maybe not...)
But the actual foundation of Musk's wealth rests on five less than praiseworthy pillars, namely:
One of those technologies is spaceflight, specifically spaceflight via reusable rockets. It is not surprising that Musk would seek to take credit for this achievement, as doing so would boost his prestige as a supposedly brilliant man who is able to solve problems that no one else can solve. But the reality of things is very different. Indeed, anyone with a functioning memory who was born in 1970 or who knows how to read a history book will remember the Space Shuttle developed by the United States in the 1970's, and which first flew in 1981. It should be noted that
all of the components of the Space Shuttle were fully reusable except for the main fuel tank for the liquid-fueled engines on the orbiter portion of the Shuttle launch vehicle. In addition, the Soviet Union developed its own mostly reusable shuttle, named the
Буран (Buran) which flew one mission in 1988. It is true that SpaceX and other private companies developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's. However, please note that for a given payload mass launched into orbit, a fully reusable launch vehicle saves only the expense of the launch vehicle. A fully reusable launch vehicle which launches a given mass into orbit will actually use more fuel than a fully or partially expendable launch vehicle launching the same mass. So there is a certain unavoidable price to be paid for spaceflight even when using fully reusable launch vehicles.
Now let's zoom in on a particular example of the use of spaceflight technology: namely, the launching of swarms (or "constellations") of satellites into low Earth orbit (or LEO, for those who like acronyms). Some of the purposes of launching such swarms include accurate mapping and building of geographic information system (GIS) models, military spying, weather mapping and forecasting, and telecommunications. Elon Musk's company SpaceX has for several years been building its own proprietary swarm of satellites in low-earth orbit. Its swarm is, of course, the Starlink "constellation". But we must note once again that Musk is not the first person to come up with this idea, nor is his company the first to try to implement it. The first telecommunications satellite constellation was actually conceived by Motorola in 1987 and launched into low Earth orbit from 1993 to 1998 by rockets commissioned by Motorola. This network is known as the
Iridium network, and it is still operational. The only innovation which Musk has brought to the field of launching swarms of LEO satellites is the attempt to use such privately-owned swarms as a tool of monopoly-building. Toward this goal,
Starlink currently has 10,413 satellites in orbit, with plans to increase the number of satellites in its swarm to 42,000 satellites, with the ostensible goal of providing "fast internet service anywhere on earth."
There are just a few problems with Starlink, however. One such problem is the obvious fact that in order for satellite operators to get along peacefully with each other, there must be rules and approvals to determine the altitudes at which satellite swarms can operate. The Starlink swarms operate in two shells, one at altitudes of between 525 and 614 kilometers (326 to 332 miles), and a lower shell altitude of between 340 and 360 kilometers (210 to 220 miles) above earth. With so many Starlink-owned satellites operating in these altitude bands,
other satellite operators are increasingly being squeezed out. Thus Musk is constructing the first space-based monopoly.
Is his monopoly sustainable? I would argue that in the long run, it is not. Why? First, because spaceflight in its present state of development is inherently unsustainable. This is especially true of chemically-powered spaceflight. Every launch of a launch vehicle represents the consumption of a certain quantity of nonrenewable resources. This consumption includes the propellants used in chemical rockets as well as the dry mass of rocket and satellite structures that are eventually launched into orbit. If the satellite is launched into a high enough orbit (or worse yet, into an escape trajectory), in most cases both it and the final stage of the rocket that launched it are never coming back to earth. If on the other hand the satellite is launched into LEO, sooner or later the materials of which the satellite is made will be turned into a thin cloud of gaseous metal oxides when the satellite's orbit degrades due to atmospheric drag and the satellite burns up in the earth's atmosphere. This means that most satellites can
never be recycled. If moving to a
circular economy is the key to building a
sustainable industrial society of the future, then commercial LEO satellite swarms like Starlink are like a hole in a bag of sugar carried outdoors during a rainstorm - a leakage of something precious, a leakage which can never be recovered.
This is true especially because the materials used to make satellites include rare, high-value strategic minerals which are also sought after by nations who want to use these materials to develop other advanced technologies. As commercial operators of LEO satellite swarms gobble up increasing amounts of these minerals,
they will find themselves in increasingly direct conflict with other actors who also want to use these minerals for their own purposes.
They will also face worsening shortages. I have mentioned that when a LEO satellite burns up in atmospheric re-entry, its materials are turned into unrecoverable smoke. Because Starlink satellites operate at such low altitudes, they don't last long in orbit. (See "
Decay time estimate for LEO spacecraft", Niccolai and Mengali,
Acta Astronautica, December 2024, and "
Starlink Constellation: Deployment, Configuration, and Dynamics", Ali, et al,
arXiv, March 2026.) According to at least one
source, one to two Starlink satellites burn up each day. These satellites must be replaced with new ones in order to maintain the desired number of satellites in the swarm. This replacement represents yet more consumption of nonrenewable rare strategic resources.
Lastly there is the ever-increasing risk of collisions between satellites when a multitude of satellites has to operate in a very narrow altitude range close to the Earth. Please note that a collision between satellites moving at a relative velocity of thousands of miles per hour with respect to each other is not the same as a collision between two cars driven by a couple of impatient boneheads on the 605 freeway in Los Angeles County. In the case of the road-bound speedsters, the collision debris will be spread over an area of perhaps a few dozen square yards at the very worst. But a collision between satellites can produce tens of thousands of small fragments, each of which is traveling at orbital velocity, and each of which is in turn able to destroy or seriously damage other satellites which have been placed into the same orbital zone. These small collision fragments can stay in orbit for much longer periods than the original satellites involved in the collision. And as these fragments strike other satellites, they can in turn produce an increasing number of high-speed clouds of debris whose fragments strike still more satellites,
in a chain reaction that eventually renders LEO unusable for satellites and unsafe for manned space flight that operates in the LEO altitude region. Such a scenario is known as a
Kessler syndrome. Should the world experience a Kessler syndrome, either gradually or suddenly, it would be game over for Starlink.
The only reason why Starlink is valuable is because it has built a near-monopoly on satellite internet service. According to
one source, SpaceX (the parent company of Starlink) loses money every time it launches a rocket. Musk's status as a trillionaire is built largely on a foundation of attempted monopolization of space in order to deliver a service to people who have been tricked into believing that they need this service. We have seen that this foundation itself rests on some rather shaky ground. What we can do is to give a bit of a shove to this foundation - namely, by learning not to need Elon Musk. This should be a key strategic objective of strategic nonviolent resistance - namely, the destruction of monopolists by learning ways to stop needing their monopolies. Once a sufficiently large number of people figures out how to make that happen, the monopolists will fall. Then all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put them back together again.
