{"id":117253,"date":"2024-10-23T01:05:46","date_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=117253"},"modified":"2024-10-23T01:05:46","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:05:46","slug":"foust-forward-elon-musk-spacex-and-the-perils-of-social-media-distractions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=117253","title":{"rendered":"Foust Forward | Elon Musk, SpaceX and the perils of social media distractions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"fluid\"\r\n     data-ad-layout-key=\"-fb+5w+4e-db+86\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"7910942971\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Nearly 12 hours after the successful Falcon 9 launch of a Crew Dragon mission on Sept. 28, SpaceX announced there had been \u201can off-nominal deorbit burn\u201d by the upper stage after deploying the Crew Dragon, which caused the stage to reenter outside the designated zone in the South Pacific. That grounded the rocket through at least Oct. 4, just as the company was preparing to launch time-critical missions like ESA\u2019s Hera asteroid probe and NASA\u2019s Europa Clipper.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-507309\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Notably silent about this anomaly \u2014 the second in less than three months involving the Falcon 9 upper stage after years of problem-free flights \u2014 has been the company\u2019s chief executive, Elon Musk. By comparison, during the earlier anomaly in July, he was providing updates on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter that he also owns, about the ultimately unsuccessful efforts to salvage the Starlink satellites stranded in a low orbit.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Politics over rockets<\/h3>\n<p>Musk has not been silent on X in general, with his posts currently dominated by political topics. When he has mentioned SpaceX in recent weeks, it has often been to complain about \u201clawfare\u201d by the FAA (for delaying the license for the next Starship launch and fining SpaceX for other license violations) and the FCC (for revoking rural broadband subsidies for Starlink.) There\u2019s been far less on other SpaceX activities, including the recent upper-stage anomaly.<\/p>\n<p>Musk\u2019s attention, of course, has long been divided, be it with electric automaker Tesla or smaller ventures like The Boring Company, Neuralink and now X. For years, other executives, like president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, have handled SpaceX\u2019s day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n<p>The public perception, though, based on his behavior on X, is that he seems less engaged with SpaceX than at any point in the 22 years since he founded the company. Even when the company stumbles, as it has with the latest upper-stage anomaly, he remains focused on political activism. He doesn\u2019t offer the behavior you would expect from a CEO after this setback: more details about what happened, reassurances that the problem will be corrected, when the rocket will fly again.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the political fever will break after the November elections and Musk will return to focus more on SpaceX. However, he has also mused about serving in a future Trump administration in some capacity, such as a \u2018government efficiency\u2019 commission, which would further drag him away from SpaceX.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ambitious timelines<\/h3>\n<p>Musk, to be clear, still talks of making humanity multiplanetary and sending humans to Mars. He posted on X in September a plan to send five uncrewed Starships to Mars in the next launch window in 2026. \u201cIf those all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in four years,\u201d he wrote, omitting details like life support systems and whether the crew would get a return trip.<\/p>\n<p>That is a typically audacious goal from Musk, but his record shows how those schedules can slip. (In 2017, for example, he said at the International Astronautical Congress that SpaceX would launch the first human missions to Mars in 2024.) Moreover, in 2026 NASA will be eagerly awaiting SpaceX\u2019s lunar Starship to land on the moon for the Artemis 3 mission (or at least an uncrewed precursor test flight) and presumably wouldn\u2019t desire the distraction of a Mars launch campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Even advocates of Musk take those plans with a grain of salt. In an exchange on X with John Carmack, the video game developer who ran suborbital spaceflight company Armadillo Aerospace for several years, Musk declared that Starship \u201cshould be doing &gt;1000 Earth orbit flights per year by 2028.\u201d That would be several times the total number of orbital launches worldwide projected for 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Carmack was skeptical. That flight rate, he wrote, \u201csounds less likely than boots on Mars in 2030 \u2014 both plausible, but aggressively optimistic!\u201d<br \/>\u201cI do expect to see both,\u201d Carmack concluded of both 1,000 Starship launches a year and humans on Mars, \u201cjust a little later.\u201d Unless, though, Musk is further distracted by social media, politics or other interests.<\/p>\n<p><em>This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"fluid\"\r\n     data-ad-layout-key=\"-fb+5w+4e-db+86\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"7910942971\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><div data-type=\"_mgwidget\" data-widget-id=\"1660802\">\r\n<\/div>\r\n<script>(function(w,q){w[q]=w[q]||[];w[q].push([\"_mgc.load\"])})(window,\"_mgq\");\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/spacenews.com\/foust-forward-elon-musk-spacex-and-the-perils-of-social-media-distractions\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 12 hours after the successful Falcon 9 launch of a Crew Dragon mission on Sept. 28, SpaceX announced there had been \u201can off-nominal deorbit burn\u201d by the upper stage &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=117253\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8628],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}