{"id":142918,"date":"2025-09-14T16:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T16:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/142918\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T16:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T16:06:07","slug":"people-who-loved-watching-spacex-launches-cant-stomach-them-anymore-since-elon-musk-started-being-so-horrible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/142918\/","title":{"rendered":"People Who Loved Watching SpaceX Launches Can\u2019t Stomach Them Anymore Since Elon Musk Started Being So Horrible"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many rocketry enthusiasts, watching SpaceX launches was an exciting hobby \u2014 one that they’d travel down<\/a> to the very bottom of Texas to witness in person at the Starbase launch facility off the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n

But with CEO Elon Musk now fully entrenched in bigoted right-wing politics<\/a>, that joy has turned to grief for former fans,\u00a0who now lament the loss of their once-joyful pastime.<\/p>\n

“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 \u2014 fear, glee, wonder and excitement \u2014 as a spaceship makes its way into a largely foreign environment,” wrote Emily Carney, a space historian and author, for SpaceNews<\/a>. “It really never gets old.”<\/p>\n

However, at the 10th Starship launch from at the end of August \u2014 SpaceX’s “most successful<\/a>” test flight of the heavy-lift vehicle yet, which should have been an exciting feat to witness \u2014 Carney recounted feeling dejected instead of elated.<\/p>\n

“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\u2019t find the enthusiasm even to watch the launch and mission unfold.”<\/p>\n

Turning to Threads, Instagram’s Twitter clone, the historian found she wasn’t alone in that feeling.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s very sad how SpaceX probably has had its biggest success tonight with Starship and I, a space freak for nearly 44 years, couldn\u2019t be bothered to watch it,” Carney posted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“This is how I feel,” remarked another user<\/a>. “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] \u2014 and I just feel nothing.”<\/p>\n

“I\u2019m 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<\/a>. “Science, NASA, and the space program will succeed and continue in spite of him. He\u2019s definitely ruined much of the joy and tainted this for so many though.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Thanks to the billionaire’s draconian cuts<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a> in\u00a0The Lancet, an esteemed medical journal.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 whose book “Star Bound<\/a>,” co-written with space scion Bruce McCandless III, details the history of NASA’s spaceflight program \u2014 to grieve.<\/p>\n

“When asked by some why I felt a lack of interest in [the latest launch of] Starship, I pointed out Musk\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

Add in Musk’s racism<\/a>, anti-Semitism<\/a>, and “white genocide<\/a>” 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<\/a> NASA and the US space program along the way.<\/p>\n

As for erstwhile SpaceX fans, that hurts.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

More on Musk’s public: Elon Musk Appears to Now Be the Most Hated Person in America, According to New Research<\/a><\/p>\n

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