I’ve had a love for space exploration for as long as I can remember. I was the kid who wore NASA shirts and talked about the Apollo program to anyone that would listen. I distinctly remember watching rocket launches in my middle school library with classmates and arguing about the space shuttle.
Something about staring up into the stars and dreaming about other planets, our future way out there, captivated me. The idea of humanity spreading into the galaxy, seeing how far we can go, entranced me.
It also aggravated me, because we weren’t there yet.
The Apollo program ended in the ’70s, and humans have not left low Earth orbit a single time since Apollo 17 in 1972. We made immense progress and did what no one thought was possible, but we have betrayed that legacy. The shuttle trapped humanity in low orbit, and a chronic underfunding of NASA did even more damage. In a better world, humanity would be much farther into the stars.
So, I got excited when I first heard of a company called SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. Its stated mission, from day one, has been to “make life interplanetary.” By the time I learned of it, it was no longer the scrappy underdog of an industry that barely existed – it was vertically landing rocket boosters on ships and pads and rapidly scaling up its production.
I was impressed. It seemed like an organization that was finally righting the wrongs of the American space program, and even if it was a private company rather than a governmental organization like NASA, I was excited. It was doing good work, and some really impressive things.
For a number of years, I stayed impressed. I was fascinated by the company and dreamed of one day working there, helping to build that interplanetary future that it promised.
But, as years passed, cracks began to show. While SpaceX has remained fairly apolitical and out of the spotlight, it became caught up in the absolute mess that was its founder, Elon Musk.
To put it lightly, the man is divisive. Between throwing his weight into anti-transgender advocacy, buying X, formerly known as Twitter, backing President Donald Trump and then doing full-on Nazi salutes on stage, he has become a lot of things – a lot of things I don’t agree with, and a lot of things I find disgusting.
Suddenly, just as SpaceX was beginning to test Starship (it’s 400-foot tall, stainless steel, mars rocket), it became difficult to support. By watching and talking about SpaceX, people began to assume I liked the other things that Musk came to represent. He turned the dream of space, that apolitical calling that so many people have shared for decades, into a divisive right-wing ideology.
It makes it hard to be enthusiastic. It’s hard to appreciate the good that the company has done and acknowledge the scientific progress it has made. The company has done things that even I, who has been watching the company’s streams and social media feeds for years, found to be almost unbelievable. Not only is it the single largest launch provider on the planet, outmatching the entire rest of the world combined with the cadence of their launches, it lands boosters to be reused. It’s not even just landing; the booster for the Starship, fittingly named Superheavy, isn’t landed for reuse, it’s caught.
SpaceX caught a 230-foot tall, 30-foot in diameter rocket booster out of the air at the same pad it just took off at. There is no way to spin that that isn’t wildly impressive and borderline unbelievable.
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It’s hard to separate the art from the artist, and this is no different. My enthusiasm may be tempered by the knowledge of what else is happening, what horrible things Musk is doing, but I am not going to let my happiness fade.
In these times, I need the hope that dreams of exploration strike into me. I may not agree, but they are righting a historic wrong, and I can’t fault them for that. I will still watch all the launches I can find, and learn as much as I can. At heart, I’m still that same kid running into the library to watch launches.
And no matter what, no one can take that away from me.
Charley Babb is a sophomore majoring in professional writing. He is an opinion writer for The Miami Student, and he is active as a fencer in the Miami Medieval Club. He likes reading and creative writing in his free time.
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