Breaking up is hard to do — especially when one party is a billionaire with near-unassailable dominance of the nation’s ability to launch things into space, and the other is a president who has staked a significant portion of his legacy on wildly ambitious space-based projects.

As President Donald Trump and his erstwhile financial backer and former DOGE boss Elon Musk traded blows on social media Thursday, the president at one point posted, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

This prompted Musk to announce that he was decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, used to transport astronauts to the International Space Station, though he later backed down from the threat.

Trump may soon find, however, that canceling Musk’s contracts is a lot harder than selling his Tesla, particularly if he wants to pursue goals like his much-vaunted Golden Dome missile defense project.

To get to space, the US needs SpaceX

During President Joe Biden’s administration, concerns were indeed raised about Musk’s lucrative government contracts as well as his access to classified defense information, given his partisan political activities (unusual for a major defense contractor), communications with foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and ties to the Chinese government.

But as Vox reported last year, unwinding the government’s relationship with Musk’s companies is a near impossibility right now, particularly when it comes to SpaceX. The company is simply better at launching massive numbers of objects into space than any of its competitors, and it’s not close: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was responsible for 84 percent of all satellite launches last year, and the constellation of more than 7,000 Starlink communications satellites accounts for around 65 percent of all operational satellites in orbit.

The reusable Falcon 9 has become the space launch workhorse of choice for a US military and intelligence community that is ever more dependent on satellites for........

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