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In the past few weeks, President Trump has seemingly done an about-face in his support for Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky. The two leaders have long had a fraught relationship, to say the least, which reached a zenith in February 2025, when they got into a heated shouting match in the Oval Office. “I’m not aligned with anyone,” Trump said at the time. “I’m aligned with the world. I’m aligned with Europe.”

Now, four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump has struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel into the United States. He’s also calling for Zelensky to be replaced, and exempting Russia from a sanctions bill passed by Congress—which Trump himself signed. Several congressional Republicans now count themselves among the inquiring minds desperate to know: Is Ukraine the United States’ ally, or is it Russia?

On today’s episode of Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster join me to discuss the conflict between the two nations and the reasons behind Trump’s realignment.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jonathan Lemire: We are now just 15 days until Election Day. Voters in many states are already casting their ballots and early-voting. And it is not only seemingly un-American to side with Moscow over a European democracy, but also it’s yet another case of where Democrats can make the argument that [Donald] Trump is kowtowing to a dictator, but also is simply distracted and doesn’t have the right priorities.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to talk about what’s happening in Ukraine, and why President Trump is choosing now to step in.

Over the last few weeks, the president has turned on Ukraine. He struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel. He exempted Russia from a sanctions bill he himself signed. He’s repeatedly attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And last week, sudden restrictions on Starshield, a version of Starlink that is crucial to Ukraine’s military operations, caught the world by surprise.

What is going on here? Is this a last-ditch midterm effort by a deeply unpopular president looking to maintain his party’s control of Congress? What impact does Trump’s meddling have on the war? Is there anything Ukraine can do?

I’m joined today by my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster, who have reported extensively on the prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and Trump’s diminishing return on his promise to end the war.

Let’s get to questions. Jonathan, Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Shuster: Thank you; great to be with you.

Jonathan Lemire: Thank you for having us.

Harris: Over the weekend, the president signed an executive order exempting Russia from new sanctions measures that Congress put into place last month. This came shortly after Trump announced that he had reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel. So, Jonathan, I want to start with you. Why does it seem that the president is siding with Russia now?

Lemire: This is the first time, I’d argue, in American political history that our campaign October surprise is a U.S. president throwing in his lot with the Kremlin. President Trump is deeply concerned about the impact of fuel prices, gas prices, that’s impacting Republicans’ chances in November. Now, the biggest reason why, of course, prices are so high is Trump’s war with Iran and Iran’s ability to limit the amount of oil coming out of the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz.

But Trump has found another scapegoat here in President Zelensky and Ukraine. And it’s a pretty staggering one-two punch: this move on the diesel, which really won’t even impact prices all that much, and then to unwind these sanctions—sanctions he had just signed a short time ago in honor of his friend the late Senator Lindsey Graham. It has clearly left Kyiv reeling and even some of Trump’s own party deeply upset.

Harris: And Simon, when you think about this support for Russia, is there any evidence that it could potentially help lessen Russia’s support for Iran? Or is that in any part of this equation for the president?

Shuster: That’s what Trump has argued in his most recent statements about this. And it was a really bizarre statement, honestly. He said, Look, of course I have to be nice to Russia; we have to prevent them from helping Iran. And we have to give Russia these goodies so that it doesn’t go and help Iran essentially kill American servicemen and women in the Middle East.

And that’s such a weak argument, honestly. That’s also the word that President Zelensky incidentally used to describe a lot of these decisions from President Trump. It’s a sign of weakness.

If you’re really out to prevent the Russians from assisting Iran, is there no better leverage that the United States, the world’s most powerful country, has than to offer sanctions relief to Russia as a preemptive request and a preemptive offer to Vladimir Putin not to help America’s adversaries? It’s just a bizarre situation. But then, that is the argument that Trump himself made in a social-media post.

Lemire: And it’s so deeply flawed because Russia’s already been helping Iran. U.S. intelligence has assessed that they have provided Tehran with information targeting coordinates and the like of American assets in the region and Americans’ allies.

Shuster: Yeah, and there have been ships spotted going from Russia across the Caspian Sea to Iran. But when this issue comes up of Russia providing military and intelligence support to the Iranians, Trump just consistently brushes it off as, It’s not that big a deal, or, Russia could be doing much worse.

Yeah, probably—Russia could be doing a lot worse. There are a lot of weapon systems it’s using in Ukraine that it has not yet given, apparently, to Iran, but it could. But I think the flaws in that argument are just insane.

Harris: The president has tried to both pressure Russia and Ukraine in recent weeks into stopping attacks on energy infrastructure, but that hasn’t necessarily worked out. Simon, what exactly happened there with those negotiations, and why did it fail?

Shuster: The “energy cease-fire,” as it’s known, has been on the table certainly since President Trump returned to the White House, about a year and a half ago. They’ve been trying to get this energy cease-fire, which would mean basically Ukraine stops hitting Russian energy-sector assets, like oil refineries and things like that, and the Russians would then reciprocate by agreeing to stop hitting Ukrainian power plants and other energy infrastructure.

So that has been discussed. Russia—Putin—has just refused to go for it in any way, shape, or form. And it seems like this summer, the Americans gave up trying to pressure Putin into accepting this partial cease-fire, and began preemptively pursuing business deals with Russia, and now more recently, easing sanctions including on Russia’s energy sector.

All of these goodies for the Russians were supposed to come—according to the negotiations with Ukraine, the Europeans, and with the Russians—after Russia agreed to a partial cease-fire. Russia refused to agree to a partial cease-fire, and it is still getting the benefits that the Trump administration were dangling in front of the Russians to get them to stop hitting Ukrainian energy-sector sites and agree to at least this partial cease-fire that the Ukrainians certainly hoped they could build a larger truce, a larger end to the war, on top of that partial end to the fighting, on one dimension of the fighting.

Lemire: As Simon so well put, this is such an extraordinarily one-sided deal—that basically Trump is not pressuring Putin to stop hitting Ukrainian infrastructure, energy infrastructure, including its electric grid, as Ukraine braces for what’s gonna be a very tough, dark, cold winter. And yet [he] is angry, furious at Ukraine because they won’t stop hitting Russian refineries. And Zelensky made it clear he would stop if Putin would agree to his end of the cease-fire. Putin won’t. So Zelensky’s like, Well, why should we? And yet Trump won’t make this an equivalence, and in fact, he’s only angry at Ukraine. And as Simon and I reported in our story last week, there’s a chance that it will escalate, Trump’s anger, that he stops sharing intel perhaps, stops allowing Europeans to purchase American weapons and ship them to Ukraine for their use.

So there are levers here that Trump could pull, and right now there’s real concern across Europe that he has just completely abandoned any pretense of being neutral and is fully on Putin’s side.

Harris: Ukraine has refrained from targeting civilians in this conflict, whereas Russia has not. How has that impacted the landscape of the war?

Shuster: That’s been a really fascinating thread in my reporting in the last few months. Particularly I’ve been writing about how Ukraine has had this plan on the table to strike Russian airports, to use drone attacks on Russian airports that would, of course, severely disrupt everyday life in Russia and the Russian economy. And from my sources in Zelensky’s team and the military in Ukraine, it’s been clear that Zelensky has been holding back.

He has approved a version of these strikes, which are very painful for Russia, but ones that don’t endanger civilian aircraft and civilian travelers. So it essentially has drones hovering over airports and disrupting the traffic and forcing the aviation authorities to slow down and delay flights and cancel flights, but it doesn’t endanger civilians. So this is an interesting dynamic, and I think what’s on Zelensky’s mind is, Hey, we are not like Russia. We are fighting this war to remain a democracy, to remain a country that values human rights and human life. And we don’t want that to allow this war to turn us into them, into the evil that Ukraine is seeing unleashed upon them.

So that’s been very important to Zelensky, and I think more pragmatically, he’s very concerned about maintaining international support. To your question, he sees attacks against civilians, even inside Russia, as something that would really hurt Ukraine’s ability to keep the world on its side. Now, again, that doesn’t seem to matter for President Trump. He appears to be turning his back on Ukraine regardless of that caution. But I think the European partners—Germany and others, European partners of Ukraine—for them, it’s quite important to see that Ukraine is not resorting to the strikes against civilians that Russia carries out on a daily basis in Ukraine.

Harris: Last week, Ukraine faced some sudden disruptions to Starshield, which is a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink. Jonathan, what do we know about who shut that down and why?

Lemire: Basically, a speed limit was capped, and Russia now has, first of all, drones that are jet-engine-powered, which go faster than ones before.

And if Starlink or Starshield is limited in the speed it can operate on, then that’s gonna limit Ukraine’s ability to shoot those drones down. It will also limit Ukraine’s ability to have any strikes in Russian-controlled territory within Ukraine. Already Elon Musk and Starshield do not let Ukraine have access to Starlink for attacks in Russia, but they do have it within the borders of Ukraine.

There’s been a lot of finger-pointing here. Our colleagues at The Atlantic have spent days on this, as to who exactly ordered it, whether it came from the White House—and there’s been some media reports that it has, and the White House has denied it. Some have floated the idea it was a glitch—no one in Ukraine believes that.

But certainly, a significant moment here reveals the power once more that Elon Musk has over human lives across this country. And Simon, go for it here. But it’s something that I know Zelensky—even in the last couple of days, even after it seemed like maybe the service was restored—has cast doubt about.

Shuster: Yeah, and Zelensky, to your point, has said—I’m paraphrasing here—basically, We’re not stupid; we know what happened. We know how Starlink works. And it just cut off. The disruptions happened in ways that leave very little possibility, if any possibility, that this was some kind of technical glitch. The scale and the timing of these disruptions made it clear that somebody made a decision to do this to Ukraine. And there has been a lot of finger-pointing.

Harris: And we should say Musk has denied that it was him, and on X said that this was the decision of the U.S. government and Trump.

When we come back, we discuss Trump’s fraught relationship with Zelensky and how Republicans and world leaders are reacting to his latest overtures to Putin.

[Music]

Harris: Trump and Zelensky have had this really fraught relationship since the president returned to office in 2025, and it now seems more contentious than ever, with the president saying that Zelensky should be replaced. What is Zelensky supposed to do here? What is he to do here? Does he need Trump on his side in order to win this war?

Shuster: I’m afraid so. And I had sources in Zelensky’s team saying basically—even some of the more hawkish ones who are calling for more aggressive strikes against Russia, including the airport strikes that I mentioned earlier. One of them even told me, If Trump now sides with Putin, if the Americans now become allies of Russia, we really need to change our strategy and basically take a deal.

And that got a lot of blowback from many people in Ukraine, including government officials who were like: No, no, no; that’s alarmism. But just in the last couple of days, President Zelensky has said something very similar in one of the interviews he gave on American TV or to the U.K.

Harris: It was on Meet the Press.

Shuster: Was it Meet the Press? And he said …

Volodymyr Zelensky: If the United States will take,—officially will take—the side of Russia, of course, if these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail, and we will not be able to stand.

Shuster: As we’ve reported, Ukraine has many cards to play militarily still. There are many targets that are pressure points inside Russia, for the Russian economy, that it could hit. But it doesn’t seem like Putin is going to budge. Those kinds of strikes, those kinds of escalations on the Ukrainian side are going to force Russia to come to the table. So it really puts Ukraine in a very difficult position if it loses this ally. And it’s not at all clear that the Europeans can pick up the slack.

Lemire: And you’re right to zero in on the relationship between Trump and Zelensky. Obviously, we had the famed Oval Office blowup in February of 2025, but it even predates that. There’s been some in Trump’s orbit who have said to me that Trump holds a grudge against Zelensky for his first impeachment, from his first term—when Trump leaned on Zelensky to try to find politically damaging information about Joe Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election, and Zelensky refused. It was captured on the call; it was captured by a whistleblower; and Trump was impeached for the first time. So he’s always had this animus there.

And it’s completely in contrast to his feelings for Vladimir Putin, who he sided with repeatedly in the first term, including in their infamous summit in Helsinki, and to even now, where Trump is trying to allow Putin to reenter the global stage, where he is trying to pressure Europeans to make more deals with Russia. He obviously wants to open up American business interests, have their access to Russia. And he’s even invited Putin to join the G20 Summit, which Trump is hosting at his golf course just outside Miami later this year.

Harris: And Jonathan, how are Republicans who support Ukraine reacting to all of the president’s overtures to Putin and Russia, and what does this mean to their broader efforts to pressure Moscow?

Lemire: Well, there’s a few things here. First of all, there’s still largely bipartisan support for Ukraine. There are some hold-out Republicans who don’t want to do it, and there’s skeptics even in the administration; obviously J. D. Vance was a loud one. But Ukraine’s biggest champion on the hill was Lindsey Graham. And Graham also played an important role as a conduit to Trump about their plight. In fact, Graham died shortly after returning from a trip to Kyiv.

There are Republicans who have voiced some public concern about this. Others are choosing to remain quiet, as they often do when Trump does something they don’t like, because they dare not cross them. But I’ve certainly spoken to a few of them the last couple of days who voiced real unhappiness about this decision for two reasons. One, simply because they do believe in Ukraine’s cause and do not think we should be backing Russia. And there’s even been some Republicans on the Hill who say, We should have hearings on this. Again, not too many voices, but they have spoken out. But others have remained quiet but are still privately seething because this is yet another distraction for them on the campaign trail. We are now just 15 days until Election Day. Voters in many states are already casting their ballots and early-voting. And it is not only seemingly un-American to side with Moscow over a European democracy, but also it’s yet another case of where Democrats can make the argument that Trump is kowtowing to a dictator, but also is simply distracted and doesn’t have the right priorities.

Shuster: If I could just add quickly on Lindsey Graham, just how ugly this looks to so many people on the Hill. I talked to Lindsey Graham about the sanctions bill that he championed and he said, Look, Simon, we’re not going to get this thing passed unless we couch it in a way that Trump will accept. And the way Lindsey Graham came up with doing that is: It’s all options. He wrote the bill as a tool kit, as he put it, for Trump to use against Russia if he chooses. It left a lot of the power in Trump’s hands to punish Russia or not to punish Russia. And that, Lindsey Graham told me, was the only way it was gonna get the necessary support from the White House to pass.

So now what we’ve seen just over this weekend: Yes, Trump after the death of Lindsey Graham agreed to sign this sanctions package, the sanctions law against Russia. But not only did he not implement it, but he basically granted an indefinite waiver for Russia to all of these sanctions. And that is such a blow to the legacy of Lindsey Graham, who really staked so much of his political capital and his efforts as a senator on getting this thing passed, certainly in the last year or so of his life, that it’s just so ugly to see, the way that that’s being trampled on.

Harris: It’s been more than four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion into Ukraine. I’m gonna ask you all to both open your reporters’ notebooks a little bit here. What will you be looking for as this situation continues to develop throughout the next week and on into the midterms?

Lemire: Well, I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, this seems to be Trump’s focus right now in this closing stretch of the campaign, which I think is, as just noted, not particularly helpful to Republicans. But as the weather gets colder, I think the whole world is gonna be watching a pair of potential summits.

One is there’s a summit coming up in China, in November, shortly after the election, where, per reporting, Putin has floated to Trump that he should meet alongside Xi Jinping of China and the three of them should come up with a plan for a deal to end the conflict in Ukraine—i.e., leaving Zelensky and Ukraine off to the side.

And then the G20, in December, where this would be Putin’s first, if he goes—and the Kremlin has not committed yet that he will. But if he goes, it would be his first appearance at a one of these big, multilateral summits in a democracy since the war began and perhaps end his status as international pariah, at least in some way.

And these are things that, as Simon covers so well for us, deeply unnerves Ukraine, which is just simply taking a pummeling right now from Russia—one that’s only increased in recent days after Trump’s moves here to help Putin.

Harris: And Simon, same thing to you.

Shuster: I’m gonna be watching very closely how Ukraine is responding to these suspensions of U.S. support. Whether it’s Starlink, whether it’s intelligence sharing, they’ve proven themselves to be extremely innovative in meeting various threats. Whether they’re diplomatic or Russian ballistic missiles or whatever, they come up with ways to adapt, whether it’s through technology or sly and clever diplomacy. So I’m watching that. They have various technologies that they’re trying to bring online as fast as possible to replace what Elon Musk has let them use so far.

And I’m also, by the same token, watching what the Europeans are doing very closely, because they see all this as a massive betrayal by the Americans. The Europeans have so much at stake in this war, and they’re going to be adjusting their understanding of the alliance with the United States, their dependence on the United States for security and military assistance, and doing their best to again rush out military assets and technologies to try to give them some autonomy from America.

Now, in the years, decades, when we look back on the situation today, I think this is gonna be a turning point in that rift between the U.S. and its closest traditional allies. So I’m gonna be watching very closely how that rift widens, and how the Europeans try to step up and do what they can to gain some greater autonomy from the United States.

Harris: All of this is evolving really quickly, and thank you both for joining me to help us understand it a little bit better. We have a lot to look out for in the coming days. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Shuster: Thank you.

Lemire: Thank you. Anytime.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

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Back in March 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, dropped news in the dead of night. “Good work by @NASA this week,” the post said. “Eliminated their unused purchasing Cards (~80%) -Terminated ~$420M in unneeded contracts, including $45M ($15m each) to three separate consultants.”

The irony should not require explanation, but as my colleague Josh Tyrangiel details in his new cover story, Musk’s company, SpaceX, might not exist today without the $1.6 billion contract it received from NASA back in 2008, when it was days away from missing payroll, to resupply the International Space Station. “The company had gone from near death to indispensable in a single quarter,” Tyrangiel writes.

Musk’s space ambitions are no secret—and they are matched, perhaps, only by the ambitions of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. In 2018, a decade after Musk’s company became the first private one to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into space, Bezos said the only way to “deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”

Private individuals have long been a part of America’s relationship with space, but the nation is now reliant on one or two people to ensure that they can achieve the goals they set. On Radio Atlantic, Josh joins me to talk about how the relationship between NASA and these companies developed, the competition between the two men, and what it means for all of us down here on Earth.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Josh Tyrangiel: Part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business. But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

[Music]

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to talk about the new space race.

Public and private partnerships have defined the nation’s relationship with space for a long time. Some of the 20th century’s earliest astronomical discoveries would not have been possible without financial support from Andrew Carnegie.

Now the future of space exploration finds itself at the behest of a trillionaire and a multibillionaire, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and their companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Over the last two decades, the two have become indispensable to NASA. If they can put aside their intense rivalry, it could benefit America’s new frontier into space.

But what is the future of space exploration if they don’t?

Today, I’m joined by my colleague Josh Tyrangiel, whose story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic explores both companies and the men who run them.

Let’s get to questions.

Josh, thank you so much for joining me today.

Tyrangiel: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Harris: Absolutely. Can you first just sort of lay a foundation for us, right? We have Musk and SpaceX, Bezos and Blue Origin, and both are building capacity for literal moonshots and beyond, right? But what can they actually do right now?

Tyrangiel: So where they are right now is that SpaceX is indispensable and critical infrastructure for the United States of America. It is how we get astronauts and materials to the International Space Station, which is really important. That’s how we get our—getting rides up there is really pretty, pretty great.

The other thing that SpaceX does incredibly well is launch satellites. And so when Elon Musk was beginning SpaceX, he really pursued it actually just as a, almost as a kind of lark. He had made some money from PayPal. He was always fascinated with space, and he thought he wanted to do this kind of, like, science experiment/publicity stunt where he would get a rocket, send it to Mars, put a robot on it, scoop up some soil, and plant the first interstellar plant. And what he discovered was that actually, it’s really expensive to buy a rocket. He went to the Russians. One of the Russians literally spat on his shoes. And so he built this rocket capacity, and we can talk about how he did it, but what he discovered pretty quickly is, like, it’s not a great business, launching rockets. It’s very expensive. There aren’t—there isn’t that much demand.

And so about 10 years ago he figured out that where there is a lot of demand is telecom, like, good old-fashioned telecom, and that became Starlink, which is a really incredible product. He has—most of the satellites in the world, he has launched through SpaceX. I believe the number is about, 80 percent of the mass in orbit is launched, has been launched by SpaceX, which is shocking. The next-closest competitor is the government of China. So when you say, like, What can they do now? Well, SpaceX kinda runs space, like, pretty clearly.

Now, Blue Origin, for all sorts of reasons, got off to a much slower start, and right now it is trying to get in the game as a competitor, largely around launch, largely around the ability to launch satellites both for itself—Amazon has satellites; Blue Origin has launched a satellite project—but also for other customers. And there are a lot of space-satellite customers out there. And it’s also working on a lunar lander for NASA that might get there by 2030. But they’re far behind, and even the CEO of Blue Origin would be the first to tell you, like, it’s not a close competition at the moment. But these two are pretty important players in the space ecosystem. Without SpaceX, you would notice. You would actually notice both from a government point of view and from a satellite point of view.

Harris: I thought it was interesting—earlier, you mentioned space travel is expensive at, like, a very base minimum, right? And really any piece about space exploration, I feel like I always get kind of bogged down in the numbers, because they just don’t compute. They seem fake, right? $50 billion here, $4 billion there. This is a lot of money to spend on something that’s not necessarily ever a guarantee. There’s no guarantee you make it to the moon. There’s no guarantee you make it to Mars. Why is space travel and the sort of space exploration, these space pursuits still worthy pursuits? Why are they still worthy pursuits?

Tyrangiel: It’s a great question, and if you talk to people in the scientific or the, sort of, NASA community, there’s a healthy debate about, what’s the right return on investment?

Let’s say it was your money, right? And you wanted to understand more about space. You could create vehicles. You could have an astronaut program. You could take on the tremendous risk to loss of life, which you don’t want. Or you could send drones. And one of the great programs right now that very few people know about is we have these two vehicles on Mars sending back photos every day that are just astonishing. It’s not an expensive program. We’re learning things about that planet that frankly—you know, if we were to wait for a human to get there, we’d be decades away. Not to mention, like, wouldn’t get them nearly as far. So there is a debate about that.

What I would say is that if you are a captain of industry and you can afford to take some pain, there’s nothing better than losing money early to create a moat around a business that at some point might be transformed from bad to incredible. And so part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business.

But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

And so, I go back to the SpaceX prospectus, which I think I referred to in the piece as, like, kind of this incredible document that, in parts, seems like a very rational plan for how to colonize space, for how to make the East India Company of space, and, in other parts, seems like a diary of a CFO’s weekend on mushrooms, right? Like, it’s crazy.

But when they say that SpaceX has a total addressable market of about $30 trillion, what they mean ultimately is creating this kind of vertically integrated loop where rockets launch satellites and data centers; data centers go through the satellites to feed compute back to Earth, running these AI models that run all of our heavy industry; and all of a sudden what looks like a lousy investment becomes an incredible investment.

And so that is how both of those men think. That’s why to people like you and me it’s like, Boy, that’s a lot of money going out the door right now. They are not worried about “right now.”

Harris: You know, and they often, sometimes they will, in order to talk about the investment, right, they will couch it in the civilizational concerns, right?

Our resources are finite here on Earth. We’re going to need to find another place. In the colonizer mind, it’s like, We are going to colonize the moon next as a sort of base to begin to look elsewhere. Do they both have that sort of civilizational concern? Is that a real concern of theirs or is it just a—

Tyrangiel: No, 100 percent sincere. I genuinely think that both men look at the state of the planet and very scientifically think, Okay, well, we need an off-ramp. In Bezos’s mind, it’s really O’Neill colonies, which is—Gerard O’Neill, in the 1970s, created this notion that you basically export all of our most polluting industries into space or onto the moon and then you kinda turn the planet into this beautiful park. And Bezos has been talking about this as long ago as his high-school-graduation speech. So he’s very sincerely focused on this notion. Musk largely thinks about Mars in the same way, which is that we need to become an interplanetary species.

That doesn’t mean they also don’t see a tremendous business opportunity. And it doesn’t mean that the rest of us, who haven’t really, um, had much say in how these resources are being allocated or whether we would prefer, in fact, that we actually just work on saving this planet—it doesn’t mean that we can’t be annoyed about it, frustrated about it. But I think all of those things are true in this case.

Harris: Could the government achieve any of the SpaceX ambitions, um, on its own? Or does it need these, sort of, mega-wealthy people in order to achieve what it’s trying to do?

Tyrangiel: You know, it’s funny. When I, um, started reporting the story and I really dove deep into the subculture of space and government and heavy industry—you know, to a person, almost everyone agrees that the Commercial Space Act, or COTS, is one of the best pieces of public policy the United States has created in the last 40 years. And that basically what it did was create competition where previously there was bureaucracy, right?

And so as a result, I think without question people would say Musk has made space move faster and farther, often at a discount to the federal government, and so that’s great, right? We actually wanna encourage that.

And by the way, as much as these are complicated and at times troubling guys, we also want people who dream this big, and we want them to be in America, right? It’s great; it’s great. We want that. The challenge of course is, where do you draw the line about authority? And so what, what I saw and what we’ve seen in the last five, 10 years, is that when you control things like Starlink, you also control things like war. That puts us in a very, very strange place.

Harris: You made this argument at the beginning, right, which is just the sort of reality of SpaceX being so far ahead of Blue Origin. What’s the best argument for hoping that Blue Origin catches up to SpaceX, and what would it look like for Blue Origin to catch up to SpaceX here?

Tyrangiel: So I’ll tell you what the CEO, who’s a guy named Dave Limp, told me. And Dave Limp worked for Bezos at Amazon for somewhere between a decade and decade and a half. Knows him extremely well, which is a very important part of making Blue Origin successful, right? Is channeling what Bezos wants, being able to challenge him when necessary.

So Dave Limp said, Look, SpaceX is ahead. But we don’t need them to fail for us to be successful. What we need is for there to be reasonable competition in the market for space launch, right?

And right now Blue Origin needs to get its act together. And what I mean by that is they’ve been at it for about 26 years. And they’re just getting to a place where they are launching, landing reusable rockets, which is the key to driving down the cost. When you’re launching a new rocket or experimenting with a new booster or a new engine, one in three is gonna fail, right? And it takes time. I think the thing that we most want to root for is for Blue Origin to get on a cadence where it is driving down cost, getting competition, right?

Getting other competitors, satellites, and other things into space beyond their own, right? What we don’t want is an environment where SpaceX controls most of the launch in the United States and most of its payloads are Starlink satellites or future AI satellites, and we don’t want that on the Blue Origin side.

Now, we have lots of ways to make sure that people don’t have that kind of monopoly. But we’re not exactly in a moment where the Department of Justice is exercising those. You know, it’d be healthy for America to have, uh, two big competitors. It’d be healthier to have four, healthier still to have eight.

Harris: When we come back, we talk to Josh about America’s ambitions in space, and whether or not they overlap with Musk and Bezos’s own ambitions.

[Music]

Harris: For the last half century, NASA has been the, sort of, benchmark for American ambition in space, and I’m often reminded of John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1962, his moonshot speech, where he says—

John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

Harris: We choose to go to the moon because it was the hard thing to do. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. What is America’s ambition now in space?

Tyrangiel: So there’s a new NASA administrator named Jared Isaacman, and Isaacman had a tough time getting confirmed, in part because he’s a self-made billionaire, and he was a SpaceX pilot. He did the first commercial space walk in history, and so his ties to Musk were an issue in his confirmation hearing. But he did get confirmed. And everybody I speak to about Isaacman says, He’s young; he’s eager; he is all in on the mission. And they don’t always love his decisions, but they think he is a legit leader. And what he’s trying to organize everybody around is the moon. He wants American boots on the moon by 2028, and so he’s pressing Blue Origin, which is making a lander; he’s pressing SpaceX, which is making a lander. He wants both in competition, and ultimately, the reasons for that are sort of a, this kind of hairball, right? Some of it’s national security, the dark side of the moon. There are people in the national-security community who say, Well, we need to get there before China does. There are others who say, Not really, and, and that when they talk to China, it’s not actually that big a deal.

But there are good reasons to go back. There’s mining on the moon. There’s rare earth minerals on the moon. And there is beginning to be this kind of space economy developing around the possibility of us getting to the moon, mining it, setting up data centers. There’s lots of buzz about nuclear reactors on the moon. That seems a little scary to me, but nevertheless that buzz is there. And so Isaacman has them pointed in that direction. And, and one interesting thing—we’re at this kind of lucky moment for America. Basically, you know, Blue Origin said, Well, let’s go to the moon. Trump sees the MAGA value in the moon. It appealed to Mike Pence, who really loves spaces. But—

Harris: The creation of the Space Force.

Tyrangiel: Yeah. Most of the time what happens is a NASA mission gets created, and four or eight years later, it gets dumped.

And the Biden administration had the, kind of, unsung civil-service hero who was on the transition team, named Bhavya Lal, who’s a really a fascinating woman, and the administration came in, and Biden’s team said, Well, this, this is probably stupid, right? She’s like, No, no, no, no. It’s not stupid. Stay the course.

And so we’ve had, for the last 10 years, actual continuity, and that is incredibly rare. And so what Isaacman has been very shrewd about is staying as close to the political middle as he can because he knows space deadlines are kinda worse than New Year’s resolutions.

Like, I don’t know of anybody who looks at a space deadline as, like, Cool, let me make sure I’m there on that date. It just doesn’t happen. So knowing that it’s likely to slip, he’s been very shrewd about positioning himself in the middle so that if there is a new party in power, the moon mission might actually persevere, and that’s a hugely important thing to us getting back to the moon.

Harris: Yeah. That sort of consistent goal. And we have that—I know that they’ve had that pretty consistent goal of getting back to the moon by 2028 with the Artemis crew. What role will Musk and Bezos, sort of, play in that mission specifically?

Tyrangiel: I mean, one of them would like to win to carry those astronauts on a Blue Origin or a SpaceX lander to the moon—to the surface of the moon, which you can imagine, if you’ve been working at this for a quarter century, would be a huge personal and professional triumph. So they’re very invested in that. Whether that competition is the right thing for the United States I think is a little bit debatable. How Isaacman approaches declaring a winner—he did not speak to me for the piece, but, like, it is a subject of heated debate inside the space community. It’s like, Which one of these vehicles is actually right for this? Are either of them right for this? And how do we choose a winner here when both have tremendous political influence?

Harris: Thinking about that idea of a winner too—you write in the piece about the ways that if they just worked together, right, we, we all might be in a better place.

Is there a world in which Musk and Bezos do actually work together?

Tyrangiel: The answer is no, definitively. They’re not gonna work together voluntarily. It’s just not gonna happen. And by the way, we do want them in competition because that competition drives price down, that competition drives creativity. Like, I think that’s great.

What we also want is a federal government that can remind what are essentially—forget the billions attached to them, forget their outsize personalities and profiles. They’re vendors, right?

We want our federal government to be able to say Okay, and, and this is really where I get to, not to spoil the piece because obviously I know people have been reading it while we’re talking, but basically when you look at, um, SpaceX’s plan for how to get to the moon, and you look at Blue Origin’s plan, they’re quite complementary.

SpaceX does one thing extraordinarily well. Blue does one thing extraordinarily well. Jared Isaacman could very easily say, Okay, SpaceX, you’re gonna be the refueler. Blue, you’re gonna be the lander. Work together or do nothing. Right? That’s what we’d love to see. It’s just an exercise in reminding everybody the nation matters more than people’s egos or people’s business plans. The problem with that is that while the leverage we have is the glory of getting to the moon, the leverage each individual has is to say, Screw you! I don’t wanna go to the moon. And guess what? Then we’re not getting to the moon.

And so that’s back to the sort of original piece of this, which is, we’re in this weird moment where we have empowered the space race; we have given federal money to these companies; we’ve given them lots and lots of support, even down to the educational system, which produces so many of the engineers working at these companies. But we’re not entirely in control of their ambitions. And even with something like the moon—you know, if they decide it’s not economically feasible, if they decide they don’t wanna work together, all that leverage is gone and we’re not getting back to the moon.

Harris: Even if the government threatens to revoke their contracts, they could just say, We have more money than that. We don’t need your contract?

Tyrangiel: So, at some point, yes, right? And SpaceX is not—SpaceX gets money from the government, but SpaceX is also funneling lots of its own money in, and it also is the launch provider of choice to satellite companies. So yeah, there is a moment at which we lose control of these companies.

Now, traditionally, we have things like the Defense Production Act. You can nationalize things. I don’t think there’s any political will for that at this moment, and so we’re navigating this really awkward conversation across the table with two guys who are not used to negotiating, giving in, working together, and so it will have an impact on our national ambitions at some point. Like, I think that’s inevitable.

Harris: Yeah. And there’s no way out of it? We’re stuck with our two billionaires/occasional trillionaire?

Tyrangiel: I mean, we can continue to encourage competitors, and there are a lot of space start-ups, but they’re pretty far away from being mature enough to compete with SpaceX, let alone Blue Origin.

So for the time being, meaning the rest of my adult life, I imagine this is how we’ll be dealing with space. Yeah.

Harris: Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and as always, it’s great to talk to you.

Tyrangiel: Great to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson.

It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.