BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Finito World
By now, the barbs exchanged between Donald Trump and Elon Musk are familiar enough in tone. One trades in superlatives and exclamation marks, the other in AI-filtered disdain. Their alliance, once held together by a cocktail of mutual utility and shared contempt for government norms, has ruptured—dramatically, publicly, and perhaps irreparably.
But beyond the headlines and ego-spats, something more consequential is happening: the unravelling—or perhaps the maturation—of a vision of the future that has animated Silicon Valley and Washington alike for over a decade. We might call this space-age libertarianism: the belief that if government could simply step aside, the future would arrive in the form of reusable rockets, Martian colonies, and orbital internet constellations, delivered not by bureaucrats but by billionaires.
This vision wouldn’t have had such legs if it wasn’t in some measure seductive. It promised speed, efficiency, and above all, scale—grand projects unshackled from the sludge of state inertia. Elon Musk was its clearest expression, a figure as comfortable testifying before Congress as posting memes from his private jet. Under the second Trump administration, the ideology was briefly institutionalised. Musk was appointed to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he presided over the wholesale dismantling of bureaucratic structures, slashing foreign aid, and boasting of $180 billion in savings—a figure, like most things in that ecosystem, disputed but never quite disproven.
Now, that alliance has collapsed. The spark? A $2.4 trillion spending bill, passed by the House and awaiting Senate approval, which Musk called a “disgusting abomination”. Trump, for his part, accused Musk of self-interest, suggesting his outrage was less about principle than the removal of electric vehicle subsidies that benefit Tesla. Musk responded with characteristic bluntness: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill… but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK.”
And so the myth shatters. Not the myth of Musk, who remains wealthy, powerful, and not entirely discredited—but the broader fantasy that the future could be subcontracted to the super-rich, that there could be a sort of Great Man fix to all our problems.
Yet it would be too simple—and too lazy—to declare the end of the space economy, or even of Musk’s influence on it. SpaceX still accounts for nearly two-thirds of global orbital launches. Starlink underpins connectivity in war zones and remote regions alike. The $630 billion global space economy is still projected to grow, albeit at a slower clip, toward a trillion-dollar valuation by the end of the decade. What is ending is not the industry itself, but the notion that it could be built on personality cults and libertarian ideology alone.
What replaces it will look more boring—more fragmented, more regulated, more beholden to international norms—but also more stable. The Trump administration is already signalling a pivot: diversifying procurement away from SpaceX, boosting funding to NASA, and cautiously courting second-tier contractors like Relativity Space and Firefly Aerospace. It might be a world where Musk may remain dominant, but he will no longer be treated as indispensable.
But really we need to peer past the volatility of these two people. This is where the story matters most for young people—for those entering an industry that was, until very recently, synonymous with one man’s vision. If you’re a student wondering whether a career in space still makes sense, the answer is yes, but not for the reasons your Twitter feed once suggested.
Aerospace still faces a major talent shortage. Nearly 30% of the U.S. aerospace workforce is over 55. There is a chronic lack of mid-career systems engineers and a heavy dependence on foreign-born talent, particularly in propulsion and autonomous navigation. NASA is hiring again, quietly expanding fellowships and reviving internships that had gone cold during the Muskification of public space policy. The private sector remains active, though perhaps a little humbler, more focused on building supply chains and satellite logistics than chasing headlines.
Opportunities are especially ripe in Earth observation, where climate change has created demand for satellite data in agriculture, insurance, and infrastructure resilience. Space law—a once-arcane field—is heating up fast, driven by a regulatory scramble over orbital traffic, debris, and militarisation. For the practically minded, commercial operators need project managers, procurement analysts, and spaceport logisticians far more than they need Mars evangelists.
In short, the industry is growing up. And like all grown-ups, it is discovering that freedom without responsibility leads not to innovation, but to chaos. The dream of space was never supposed to hinge on one man’s Twitter account or a president’s mood. The sooner we accept that, the better.
Elon Musk was right about one thing: government, left to its own devices, often gets in its own way. But government subcontracted to billionaires is not an escape from politics; it is politics in its most unstable form. What we are seeing now is the slow, necessary evolution of a hybrid model—one in which private enterprise innovates, yes, but within the bounds of democratic oversight, fiscal reality, and international law.
This may not be the future we were promised, but it is one we can build on. The myth of the techno-saviour may be over. The space economy, thankfully, is not.
