President-elect Donald Trump had high words of praise for Elon Musk and SpaceX during his election night victory speech.
In a speech broadcast on Tuesday night (Nov. 5), Trump recalled watching the most recent and fifth flight test of SpaceX's Starship rocket as well as his conversations with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about the use of the company's Starlink satellites in North Carolina following the deadly impacts of Hurricane Helene.
"And I called Elon. I said, 'Elon, was that you?' He said, 'Yes, it was.' I said, 'Who else can do that? Can Russia do it? 'No.' Can China do it?' 'No," Trump said in the speech, recalling watching Starship's most recent test in which the massive rocket was caught by the "chopstick" arms on SpaceX's launch tower. "'Can the United States do it, other than, you?' 'No, nobody can do that.' I said, 'That's why I love you, Elon, that's great.'"
Trump said he had to put a donor on hold for 45 minutes while watching the test flight, which he said he thought was a "Space Age movie or something."
The president-elect then recalled calling Musk following Hurricane Helene after receiving multiple inquiries about the use of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, which have been used to provide vital communications services following natural disasters and conflicts around the world. Following the devastating hurricanes Helene and Milton, SpaceX made Starlink broadband services free for the rest of 2024, aside from hardware costs, to all users who live in areas affected by the storms.
"The people from North Carolina came to me and they said, 'Would it be possible at all possible for you to speak to Elon Musk? We need Starlink,'" Trump said during his victory speech, adding "I said, 'What's Starlink?'"
"What the hell is it?," Trump said he asked Musk about Starlink. "He said, 'It's a communication system that's very good.' I said, 'Elon, they need it really, really badly in North Carolina. Can you get it?'"
"He had that there so fast. It was incredible," Trump said. "So, and it was great. It saved a lot of lives. He saved a lot of lives. But he's a character. He's a special guy. He's a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses. We don't have that many of them. We have to."
Musk endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Trump's administration has campaigned heavily on the deregulation of U.S. industries, an issue about which Musk and SpaceX have been vocal throughout the testing campaign of SpaceX's Starship rocket.
Musk called for the resignation of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Michael Whitaker in September after the FAA fined SpaceX for two launch violations. SpaceX threatened to sue the FAA for "regulatory overreach" in response.
Trump has touted his accomplishments in American spaceflight for years, stating that one of his proudest achievements of his first term was creating the U.S. Space Force. In 2020, Trump's campaign released a 2.5-minute video titled "Make Space Great Again" that lauded his administration's role in the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, the first orbital human spaceflight to launch from the United States since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011.
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