Gov. Gavin Newsom has sided with billionaire Elon Musk after a California agency rejected a plan to increase SpaceX rocket launches in Southern California.
“I didn’t like that,” said Newsom of the way the California Coastal Commission, which oversees the use of land and water within the state’s more than 1,000 miles of coastline, handled the proposal.
While the rockets are mainly used to deliver the company’s Starlink satellites, which provide commercial satellite internet and telecommunications, they’re also used for military missions, and officials consider the missions to be critical to national defense.
The Coastal Commission rejected the proposal for increased launches on Oct. 10 with a 6–4 vote, saying commercial space launches are not federal government activity and must submit to the commission’s coastal development permitting authority.
In a lengthy discussion on the matter, commissioners also commented on Musk’s social media posts and his open support of former President Donald Trump as concerns.
“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting.
Other commissioners agreed with her.
“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way ... that I find to be very disturbing,” said Caryl Hart, chair of the agency’s 12-commissioner board.
Gretchen Newsom and Hart both voted to reject the plan after condemning Musk’s conduct.
In the lawsuit, SpaceX argues the commission “engaged in naked political discrimination.”
“Rarely has a government agency made so clear that it was exceeding its authorized mandate to punish a company for the political views and statements of its largest shareholder and CEO,” the suit states.
Newsom said he was in general agreement with SpaceX’s rationale for bringing forth the lawsuit, which was filed in the court for the Central District of California.
“Look, I’m not helping the legal case,” Newsom told Politico. “You can’t bring up that explicit level of politics.”
The governor said the commission erred by not solely focusing on the permit’s merits during their discussion, instead of digressing into a wide-ranging discussion of Musk’s politics.
“These are friends of mine that said that,” Newsom said, who was responsible for appointing certain members of the commission. “These are good commissioners. But you got to call balls and strikes. And trust me, I’m not big on the Elon Musk bandwagon right now. So that’s me calling balls and strikes.”
Newsom also said his office helped work on the proposal to increase the number of SpaceX launches.
“We engaged in the spirit of finding compromise,” the governor said. “It wasn’t about SpaceX, it was about exploration and other precedent. So I saw that [decision, and thought] that’s not what this was about. ... They certainly could have said, ‘We are just not comfortable with [the proposal] right now.’ But that wasn’t what they said.”
The rejection might not mean the end of the proposal to increase SpaceX launches, according to the commission.
Although certain activities by federal agencies such as the Space Force—which is organized under the Air Force—must be approved by the commission, these agencies maintain the authority to continue “as they see fit regardless of the commission’s determination,” commission spokesman Joshua Smith previously told The Epoch Times.
The Coastal Commission did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times regarding Newsom’s comments by publication time.
