Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Wednesday said that without “significant” reforms, SpaceX’s efforts to make life multiplanetary and take humanity to Mars could face hurdles.
What Happened: “We will never reach Mars if Kamala wins,” Musk wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “Trump supports a government efficiency commission to allow great things to be done, Kamala does not.”
Last week, Republican candidate Donald Trump said at the New York Economic Club that he would establish a government efficiency commission headed by Musk if he wins the election in November.
"I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms," Trump said.
Musk has previously detailed the potential benefits of such a committee, including a "tremendous amount of growth and opportunity" created by deregulation and reduction of wasteful government spending.
“That's (accumulation of regulations) like the hardening of the arteries. Or a way to think of it is being tied down by a million little strings like Gulliver. You can't move. And it's not like any one of those strings is the issue, it's that you've got a million of them,” Musk said about the commission in a podcast with Lex Fridman in August.
The billionaire entrepreneur then also added that there needs to be a “garbage collection” system for regulations to prevent them from accumulating and preventing key projects such as building high-speed rail in the country.
“Unless there is significant government reform, laws & regulations will keep getting worse every year until every great endeavor, from high-speed rail between our cities to making life multiplanetary, is effectively illegal,” Musk reiterated on Wednesday. The billionaire officially endorsed Trump in July.
Why It Matters: SpaceX on Tuesday pinned regulatory red tape as the cause for delays in the development of its ambitious Starship launch vehicle whose fifth flight test is now expected in late November.
Starship has been ready for its fifth flight test since the first week of August but has been put off owing to "frivolous" and "patently absurd" licensing issues, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.
"Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware," SpaceX said.
The company said that it recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), marking a two-month delay from the previously communicated date of mid-September. The delay, the company said, was not based on a new safety concern but on "superfluous" environmental analysis.
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