But the orbit currently getting the most attention is not in the heavens — it’s the increasingly intimate one back on Earth uniting the planet’s soon-to-be-again most powerful man and its richest man.
President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk — after trips to see Republicans in Washington and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in New York, including a mid-flight McDonald’s with a grimacing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — took to the road again to watch Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket blast off on its latest test flight.
For once, Trump’s hyperbole wasn’t over the top. “I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground,” he wrote on social media.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX visionary, has spent the last two weeks basking in Trump’s reflected glory at Mar-a-Lago. He’s around so much it’s almost like he’s family, and he even made it into a photo of Trump’s extended clan. Now, it was time for him to share some of his own aura with his new best friend.
Trump, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed against the glare and sporting a red MAGA hat bearing a “45” and a “47,” struck a Mount Rushmore pose, certainly aware of television split screens that would pair him alongside the rocket’s takeoff burn. He looked almost if he was claiming some of the credit for himself.
In the nervous moments before the launch, various lesser satellites revolved around Trump, including his son Donald Jr., Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician. But the president-elect seemed most animated when Musk appeared and explained what would unfold when the rocket took off.
A bit of a disappointment
In the event, Trump didn’t get to see the ballistic ballet of SpaceX returning its massive booster to be clutched by a state-of-the-art launchpad that he raved about on the campaign trail. “I see that fire pouring out the bottom of the rocket that’s coming in sideways and I say, ‘it’s going to crash into the gantry,’” Trump said earlier this month. “And those two big beautiful arms they grab it — I said, ‘What the hell was that?’”
On Tuesday, mission controllers made a split-second decision instead to ditch the giant Roman candle-like vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico after its slow-motion descent. “Maybe they just want to be careful not to kill the president-elect of the United States by any chance,” Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida, told CNN.
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