WASHINGTON: Elon Musk and SpaceX are big winners in President Donald Trump’s 2026 spending plan.
Trump is delivering on Musk’s wishlist at both Nasa and the Pentagon to reorient federal spending on space in a way likely to drive billions of dollars in new business to Musk’s space technology company, if Congress signs off on the budget plan. At the Pentagon, Trump is calling for a massive jump in spending – a 13% increase to $1.01 trillion — almost entirely via allocations in a congressional budget reconciliation plan.
The jump would happen while many other federal agencies would be slashed, in part to supercharge federal spending in two areas where SpaceX is positioned to profit – a vast missile defence system and space missions to Mars and the moon.
Trump has proposed a Golden Dome defense system to track and kill missiles headed toward US targets, possibly sent by China, Russia, North Korea or other rivals. Pentagon officials say SpaceX is considered likely to be the top recipient of this burst of new spending, because SpaceX manufactures both rockets that can launch military payloads into orbit and satellite systems that can deliver the surveillance and targeting tools needed for the project.
Trump’s budget plan also calls for an undisclosed but large amount of new money for “US space dominance to strengthen national security.”
Nasa’s budget faces overall cuts in Trump’s plan — down 24% from $24.8 billion in the current budget year– but there are increases that largely match SpaceX’s own corporation priorities. The spending plan goes after Musk’s commercial rivals, calling for Nasa to phase out funding for the Space Launch System, a rocket program being led by Boeing, and also the Orion astronaut capsule, being built by Lockheed Martin, part of three planned flights to take humans back to the moon.
Instead, Trump’s budget calls for “more cost effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” an industry that SpaceX now dominates. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which has developed its own new rocket, also could be a big beneficiary of this shift, industry executives said Friday.
