[[{“value”:”
SpaceX recently launched its 10th Starship flight from Starbase in South Texas. This proved to be the most successful Starship flight yet, with the vehicle making a (mostly) intact water landing. Starship is the most powerful heavy-lift launch vehicle ever built and it’s making some progress amid numerous high-profile failures and one test stand explosion this year. So I should be happy, right? Yeah, um, no. I have been a space fan for pretty much all of my life, yet I couldn’t find the enthusiasm even to watch the launch and mission unfold.
I was surprised and a bit relieved to discover that it wasn’t just me, as evidenced by the many responses I received on Facebook and Threads when I posted about my feelings. One response read, “We cannot ignore [Elon, SpaceX’s CEO] Musk. He’s trying to be all cute on Twitter with his ‘I’m a scientist again!’ cosplay. But he facilitated the platforming and victory of a true authoritarian regime. You can’t just separate that.”
Another response read, “This is how I feel. Space obsessed since I watched Apollo as a five-year-old. Space mad. Read every book I could, build my own rockets, named a child after a cosmonaut, cried the whole way around [Kennedy Space Center] – and I just feel nothing.”
A considerable part of the space fandom is experiencing a specific kind of grief when the thing you most enjoyed is now associated with other things that are irretrievably dark. We haven’t yet found a civilized way to discuss it, so we’re just distancing ourselves from the thing we enjoyed.
On the other side of the coin, many gladly admitted to watching the launch, which is fine — no one is attacking anyone for enjoying and being excited about a space launch. Most of the time, watching a rocket launch as a grown-up fills me with the same feelings I had when I saw my first as a kid — fear, glee, wonder and excitement – as a spaceship makes its way into a largely foreign environment. It really never gets old. What was disturbing to me, however, was the number of people who ignored or denied Elon Musk’s frankly erratic behavior over the last year and even defended it.
Why do we defend things we’re fans of?
For better or worse, Musk is the “face” of SpaceX, as most CEOs define the corporate culture and public relations of their organizations. Here are some things that cannot be denied or brushed under the rug. A longform New York Times article detailed Musk’s baby mama drama and alleged heavy drug use during and after Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his election, which Musk prominently supported. Most visibly shocking was Musk making two Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration in January, a gesture that perhaps overshadowed the inauguration itself.
But there’s more. Musk used his X platform to share xenophobic and antisemitic content, spurring American and Canadian Jewish groups to call for an exodus from the social media platform. He also used the platform to promote disinformation about “white genocide” in his native country of South Africa, prompting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to push back on Musk’s “completely false narrative.” Musk, the world’s richest man, has 14 kids by four different women and also gleefully bragged about destroying a government agency that provided food to starving people.
Musk’s damage to United States space policy is likely to be long-lasting and permanent. While Musk was heading DOGE, the Trump administration proposed slashing NASA’s budget by 25%, ending many missions and programs including the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, ironically championed in Trump’s first term as he promoted a U.S. return to the moon. In more recent months, Musk and Trump had a very public falling out on social media, and Musk proposed starting his own “America Party.” Their ongoing feud likely led the administration to rescind its nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA, and currently the U.S. space agency is without an administrator. Now Musk is attempting, as the Threads commenter above pointed out, to distance himself from the rhetoric he previously championed.
When asked by some why I felt a lack of interest in Starship, I pointed out Musk’s January gesture, which to me could not be mistaken as anything other than what it appeared to be: a Nazi salute. I saw this happen with my eyes, which are connected to my optic nerves that happen to be connected to my brain, so I don’t think — especially given the many articles and think pieces generated about this gesture and what it meant — I merely imagined, conjured or hallucinated it. Nevertheless, I had some SpaceX fans denying he’d ever done it in my comments.
Why do people defend someone who has done things that are frankly terrible? Is it because they’re fans of what the person has previously done? Is it a matter of identity and self-concept (“I’m a fan of this and it defines me”)? Is it cognitive dissonance? Is it social pressure from fellow SpaceX fans, or a bias? Or is it because they’ve already emotionally invested themselves in SpaceX, and simply are hopeful and optimistic? Many of Musk’s earlier fans who now understandably deride him previously supported him because his ideas about off-world space settlement resembled influential futurist Gerard K. O’Neill’s, at least on a surface level, and somewhat mirrored O’Neill’s 1970s brand of optimism and better living through tech. All these things populated my mind as I tried to understand why so many of us are excusing the actual harm someone has directly done to our society, economy, and culture.
Consider the making and reception of the 1976 version of A Star is Born, which starred perennial chanteuse Barbra Streisand. While I’m not supposing Streisand is anything like Musk politically or personally, there are some minor parallels in how her fandom reacted to the movie upon its release. Streisand was so displeased with the final product that she chopped up the film herself to make a version she liked. The result was a movie that was widely critically panned upon its release, but her fans ate it up. Longworth stated something to the effect that Streisand’s fans liked the movie anyway, because they loved that Streisand just “didn’t give a shit.”
Indeed, many of Musk’s fans love him because they, too, believe he “doesn’t give a shit.” But a bad movie never permanently hurt anyone. Musk did. There are still repercussions from his work at DOGE, and a whistleblower has pointed out how his minions at DOGE compromised the U.S. Social Security database, home to millions of Social Security numbers.
Musk never had to enter himself into U.S. politics and space policy. He chose to. And now this makes him, SpaceX and even NASA, which was dragged into partisan politics in a way it previously hadn’t been, targets — which his diehards don’t quite understand.
As I write this, Musk’s efforts with DOGE have largely gutted NASA’s resources, and scores of employees have either been laid off or opted to leave the agency. The damage to the agency, although not publicly visible, is likely to be substantial and long-term. The Artemis program is rumored not to fly past Artemis 3; there’s some murkiness about whether there will even be enough of a workforce to support the remaining flights. It also bears mentioning that the massive reduction in NASA’s workforce could jeopardize what remains of the Artemis program’s management and safety — not good things if you want to send machines and people to the Moon. Ironically, in text and meta-text, Starship is actually part of the Artemis plan and is supposed to function as a moon lander. It seems like when a finger points at “government waste,” another finger points directly at itself.
Again, the most exasperating thing about this whole sad saga is that Musk’s fan contingent seems not to understand that Musk is not some random target of “The Left.” Rather, he made the choice himself to enter the full-contact world of politics. His actions hurt not only governmental agencies and employees but also the companies he leads, and nobody else pushed him into it. Indeed, many Tesla owners who are embarrassed by him have bumper-stickered their electric cars with, “I bought this before he went crazy.” Others have taken a loss on their cars and gotten rid of them entirely. There’s a song on the 1995 Radiohead album The Bends that, to me, best sums it up, called “Just”:
You do it to yourself, you do
And that’s what really hurts
Is that you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else
You do it to yourself
You do it to yourself
Emily Carney is a space historian and lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida. She is the author of “Star Bound: A Beginner’s Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard’s Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between” along with Bruce McCandless III. She would like to thank Dwayne Day and Bruce McCandless III for their help with this article.
SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community’s diverse perspectives. Whether you’re an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors.
“}]]
Source: Read More