For many rocketry enthusiasts, watching SpaceX launches was an exciting hobby — one that they'd travel down to the very bottom of Texas to witness in person at the Starbase launch facility off the Gulf of Mexico.

But with CEO Elon Musk now fully entrenched in bigoted right-wing politics, that joy has turned to grief for former fans, who now lament the loss of their once-joyful pastime.

"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," wrote Emily Carney, a space historian and author, for SpaceNews. "It really never gets old."

However, at the 10th Starship launch from at the end of August — SpaceX's "most successful" test flight of the heavy-lift vehicle yet, which should have been an exciting feat to witness — Carney recounted feeling dejected instead of elated.

"I should be happy, right? Yeah, um, no," she wrote. "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."

Turning to Threads, Instagram's Twitter clone, the historian found she wasn't alone in that feeling.

"It’s very sad how SpaceX probably has had its biggest success tonight with Starship and I, a space freak for nearly 44 years, couldn’t be bothered to watch it," Carney posted.

"This is how I feel," remarked another user. "Space obsessed since I watched Apollo as a five year old. Space mad. Read every book I could, built my own rockets, named a child after a cosmonaut, cried the whole way around [Kennedy Space Center] — and I just feel nothing."

"I’m trying to take comfort in the fact that a lot of good, heartfelt effort and dedication have gone into the Starship program long before Musk became whatever the pure awfulness he is today," wrote yet another Threads user. "Science, NASA, and the space program will succeed and continue in spite of him. He’s definitely ruined much of the joy and tainted this for so many though."

It's not hard to see why those onetime SpaceX-watchers feel so crestfallen, given that Musk's horrendous politics quite literally have a death toll. Thanks to the billionaire's draconian cuts to grants for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during his time in Donald Trump's White House, an estimated 360,000 people have already died from starvation and lack of medication, and an additional 14 million lives could be lost should those cuts be codified and extended through 2030, per a new study in The Lancet, an esteemed medical journal.

With the USAID cuts alone being enough for any avowed SpaceX-watcher to turn their back on the Musk-owned company, there are plenty of other reasons for people like Carney — whose book "Star Bound," co-written with space scion Bruce McCandless III, details the history of NASA's spaceflight program — to grieve.

"When asked by some why I felt a lack of interest in [the latest launch of] 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," she wrote of the CEO's infamous Sieg Heil at Trump's inauguration. "I saw this happen with my eyes."

Add in Musk's racism, anti-Semitism, and "white genocide" outbursts, and you have a wannabe spaceman who "never had to enter himself into US politics and space policy," Carney wrote, instead choosing to enter that fray and irreparably harm NASA and the US space program along the way.

As for erstwhile SpaceX fans, that hurts.

"A considerable part of the space fandom is experiencing a specific kind of grief," she wrote, "when the thing you most enjoyed is now associated with other things that are irretrievably dark."

More on Musk's public: Elon Musk Appears to Now Be the Most Hated Person in America, According to New Research


Share This Article