President-elect Donald J. Trump plans to attend a SpaceX launch in Texas on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the planning, in yet another demonstration of the billionaire Elon Musk’s increasing closeness to the incoming president.
SpaceX will be conducting its sixth test of its Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, which it soon hopes to use to deliver more of its Starlink communications satellites into orbit and to carry NASA astronauts to the moon. Eventually, Mr. Musk wants to use Starship to take humans to Mars.
The test launch is planned for 5 p.m. Eastern time. Mr. Trump’s plans could always change.
Mr. Musk has been a ubiquitous presence during the presidential transition, frequently attending meetings with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago and sitting in on job interviews for his administration. He traveled with Mr. Trump to Washington, accompanying the president-elect at a meeting with House Republicans. He sat ringside with Mr. Trump at an Ultimate Fighting Championship in New York over the weekend.
SpaceX’s rocket launches have become major media moments for his fans and inner circle, who trek to watch them live. And Mr. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Musk’s rocket launches. In the final stretch of Mr. Trump’s campaign, he would frequently interrupt his own political messaging to marvel over SpaceX, particularly the moment when a reusable booster rocket was recaptured at the launchpad by a pair of mechanical arms. Mr. Trump, who made a habit of flitting from topic to topic, would spend a minute or two describing the rocket booster’s recovery with awe.
By the end of his campaign, Mr. Trump was repeating the same well-worn story at nearly every rally: that he had been on the phone with some business leader but had been so captivated by footage of the Starship test that he put the call on hold. (The length that Mr. Trump left the man hanging on the other end of the phone has varied from day to day. By his final rally of the campaign, in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump said “that guy was holding, like, for an hour and a half.”)
The stakes for Mr. Musk go beyond having the president-elect’s admiration.
Delays in the approval of launch licenses by the Federal Aviation Administration and Interior Department, as well as fines for environmental violations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, have been a great source of frustration for Mr. Musk. This is in part what inspired him to push Mr. Trump to name him to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a role to which Mr. Trump also named Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican challenger who dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and became a fervent Trump acolyte. The newly announced entity — whose acronym, DOGE, can be read as a play on Mr. Musk’s cryptocurrency Dogecoin — will look for up to $2 trillion in federal spending to cut by July 2026.
Mr. Musk’s roles as government official and entrepreneur have drawn scrutiny over the possibility of conflicts of interest. The federal government has already committed as much as $4.4 billion to SpaceX to pay for Starship missions to the moon, but Mr. Musk will almost certainly seek billions of dollars in additional contracts, including with the Pentagon, which is considering using it to rapidly ship cargo across the world and for other military missions.
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