Starship's reentry sonic boom in a political storm

A few days ago I watched the epic fifth flight test of Starship, the giant SpaceX rocket that, Elon Musk’s hopes, will one day take human colonists to Mars.

I watched the flight test live via X, including its most critical moment: the catch of the Super Heavy booster. Commentator Katherine Boyle called it “The Fall of the Century” and said that it “restored faith in the American Dream.”

Visible sonic boom as Starship returns to Earth (*Credit: Liv Boeree/YouTube*).

Liv Boeree has captured the last seconds of the return of the Super Heavy booster in this video. The video shows a visible (and audible!) reentry sonic boom.

This was a very ambitious and perhaps risky test. In fact, SpaceX made the final decision to try and catch the booster only minutes before the actual catch. Any number of small technical glitches could have turned success into failure. It’s difficult to escape the impression that the universe loves Elon Musk and wants us to advance rapidly on the road to the planets and the stars.

The stunning achievement of SpaceX has been hailed as a major spaceflight milestone and praised by space experts, public figures, and politicians from all over the world. With one very notable exception though: the President and Vice President (and presidential candidate) of the United States.

Boom over troubled waters

The waters that we can see in the video are calm. But Elon Musk’s giant rocket returned to the troubled waters of a political storm centered on Musk’s cultural and political positions.

“Musk mania in the media this month has reached a level of uncontrollable hysteria,” legal and political commentator Jonathan Turley posted to X.

Turley has written a scathing indictment of the pundits and politicians who are unleashing unhinged attacks on Elon Musk.

Turley reports that California Coastal Commission has rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base because they don’t like the political positions of Musk.

The incident was covered by The Los Angeles Times. The California Coastal Commission has an environmental mission, but there isn’t much about the environment in the LA Times story. Rather, the story reports one after another personal attack on Elon Musk by representatives of the Commission, such as:

“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race… Just last week that person was talking about political retribution… Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods…”

These remarks by several Commission officials, video recorded and ridiculed by Greg Gutfeld, seem to reflect personal animosity based on partisan politics rather than anything even remotely related to the environment.

Turley reports many other rabid attacks on Elon Musk by well-known public figures, some even calling for his arrest and deportation.

Where does all this hatred come from?

Free speech and Donald Trump

Elon Musk has become a major topic of discussion because he’s allowing more free speech on X and he’s vocally supporting Donald Trump.

“I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech,” says Turley. “The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.”

I totally agree with Turley (and Musk) on the paramount importance of free speech. Turley has written a book titled “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (2024).

Musk’s bet on Trump seems a dangerous one: if Trump doesn’t win the upcoming elections in the U.S., it seems inevitable that the government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years.

At this moment, the upcoming elections in the U.S. seem a very tight race.

The polls slightly favor one of the two main candidates, and the betting markets slightly favor the other. Of course, this could change next week, or tomorrow, or anytime before the elections. I don’t rule out the possibility that one of the two main candidates could win in a landslide. Neither do I rule out the possibility that the winner could win with only a very small margin, so small that half of the U.S. population will dispute the results of the elections.

Possible political outcomes

Elon Musk has more that 200M followers on X. Probably half of them are bots and a very large fraction of the rest are casual followers who don’t pay attention to him or wouldn’t be influenced by what he says. But he can likely direct a few tens of thousands of votes to Trump, and this could be a decisive factor in some swing states.

There were indications that the FAA wouldn’t have authorized this flight test before the elections. Some commentators interpreted this an indication that the U.S. current administration didn’t want to risk a success of the flight test that would have given unwanted publicity to Musk before the election.

Then the FAA authorization came all of a sudden. I thought of a little conspiracy theory: perhaps the administration green-lighted the flight test hoping for a catastrophic failure that would, they hoped, reduce the public appeal of Elon Musk. But if so, their move backfired catastrophically! If anything, the spectacular sonic boom of Starship is likely to bring a few more votes to Trump.

Whatever the result of the elections, the U.S. will still be a very divided country afterward.

But spaceflight is an endless source of pride and hope that transcends petty partisan politics. I hope the next U.S. administration, whichever it is, will stay on the path followed by the Trump and Biden administrations.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson praised SpaceX after the booster catch, affirming the plan to go “to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars.”

This is the right spirit! And I hope the U.S. space program will have bipartisan support. This would show that, even today, honest politicians of different camps can work together and negotiate viable paths to the common good.

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