Once the Rockets are Up, Who Cares Where they Come Down?

So SpaceX’ latest rocket blew up the night before last, and it has me thinking about the inhumanity and inflexibility of fascism.

Commenter Martin at Balloon-Juice gave me the best explanation of how to understand Musk’s attitude towards his various enterprises: He thinks that building cars is easy, so he interferes with his engineers there (leading to the IncElCamino). Similarly, he thinks social networking is easy, so that’s why he fucked up Twitter. But he thinks rocket science is hard, so he mainly stays out of that and leaves the work to the engineers at SpaceX.

But now Elon’s in a bind because he looks the fool at Tesla and Twitter, so I assume he, ketamine, adderal, weed and whatever else he’s taking have decided that he’s a rocket scientist now. So, my guess, having seen his kind before (salesman who thinks he’s an engineer), is that he’s pushing, rushing and second-guessing the SpaceX engineers in charge of his new rocket, because he needs a “win” to show the world that he still “has it”. The results of his meddling are spread all over the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Texas prairie.

I’m thinking at some point SpaceX will be effectively nationalized, because our decision to turn over a big part of our space program to a drug addicted nazi is endangering our national security. The rockets that Elon keeps blowing up are supposed to carry astronauts.

Anyway, if he weren’t such a narcissistic fascist with a brittle ego, maybe he could slow down Starship development and have his engineers do some serious retrospectives about whatever defects are dogging the program. And maybe instead of his stupid statements like “just a scratch” about the explosion, he could acknowledge there’s a problem.

But he can’t, and he won’t, and when people like him are in charge, countries fail because of their fragile masculinity.

Open thread. And, speaking of nazis and rockets: