'Open corruption': Musk plots SpaceX takeover of FAA flight safety
FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump during a campaign rally, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo REFILE - QUALITY REPEAT
Now that Elon Musk, the engineer behind DOGE, has executed over 30,000 government layoffs, firings and/or buyouts, he’s set his sights on the Federal Aviation Administration — and wants to offer "his own SpaceX technology as the future of flight-safety," Bloomberg reports.
There are a multitude of questions unanswered about Musk's directive, most notable that the FAA signed a 15-year contract with Verizon to essentially do the same thing Space X is proposing.
"Two weeks ago, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska showed up at the Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters in Washington to deliver what he described as a directive from his boss Elon Musk: The agency will immediately start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace system," Blomberg reports.
Vice News Deputy DC Bureau Chief Todd Zwillich called Musk's effort “open corruption."
Critics, such as the former head of the agency, Michael Whitaker, have been swift in condemning the move, and it’s not a secret that Musk himself has had the FAA on his target list.
Views inside the FAA on Musk’s arrival are mixed. Some FAA officials and air traffic controllers present at the Starlink meetings privately bristled at the idea of the agency working with Musk’s company while also regulating SpaceX. Others raised concerns that the rush to deploy Starlink terminals could come at the cost of safety and could leave the system vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“You have to be slow and careful to make sure you are not introducing new risk into the system,” Katie Thomson, former deputy administrator for the FAA told Bloomberg. “You don’t just flip a switch and say, ‘go full speed.’”