Elon Musk Falls to Earth



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BElon Musk, an activist for the illiterate Obama, has puzzled observers in recent weeks. Something has come into him, and it could come from Mars.

NASA, in late July, dealt a blow to one of Musk's major projects. "The Terraforming of Mars is not possible using current technology," said the space agency.

Musk, as recently as last year, said he was "pretty confident" that he could send cargo ships to Mars by 2022, people by 2024, and that his plan included "over the time the terraforming of Mars and make it really nice. "

Musk argued that Mars contained enough CO2 in the soil, which, once released, could create a pleasant greenhouse effect. It was at this time that NASA felt the need to bring together leading scientists from Mars' atmosphere to politely correct Musk.

This was not the only disagreement between NASA and Musk this year. In May, NASA scientists opposed Musk's idea that its aerospace company, SpaceX, could inject more fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket by keeping it at extremely high temperatures.

While Musk has found a paying customer for his planned commercial trip to the moon next decade, much of the past year has been a disappointment for the regularly announced rocket man as the hero of a new space age.

Musk, a few years ago, was cool – Obama cool. When Obama visited Cape Canaveral in 2010, he wandered around the tarmac with Musk. Musk was the great speaker at the annual conference of the Obama import-export bank, and one of the major donors.

The Conservatives also took advantage of Musk's love, as he was supposed to privatize space travel and create new frontiers in innovation.

An article earlier this year by my friend, curator Matt Continetti, extolled Musk's ability to "speed up the pace or exalt the imagination" with his "vision of the human future in space".

And the intelligence, the pro-business, the moderate establishment felt the same thing. Following the election of President Trump, New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote an article entitled "Do you want to bring back jobs, Mr. President-elect? Call Elon Musk. Sorkin called Musk "the real Tony Stark" and wrote about Musk's businesses "It's the future of manufacturing".

Sorkin is mocked at those who criticized the dependence on SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City grants, saying that Musk is really "a great example of all we want our leaders to do." 39, business are.

But Musk has had a difficult time this year.

Tesla announced in February a quarterly loss of $ 675 million. In March, Moody's reduced the company's debt. In July, Musk bizarrely called a British diver in the cave, a pedophile on Twitter. The diver, who rescued young Thai football players trapped in a cave, has since sued Musk.

In mid-August, Musk was in emotional crisis, with stories New York Times talk about his emotional fraying. Around the same time, he published conflicting and bizarre stories about taking Tesla privately – comments that led to an investigation by the Department of Justice.

Musk, meanwhile, managed to rage the press with tweets resembling those of Trump attacking the media, before smoking a joint on a filmed podcast.

Once a hero for many people in the press, left, right and in the futuristic environment, Musk runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock.

To a certain extent, SpaceX has also reduced its own sails. Musk's schedules for spaceflight, Mars terraforming and lunar landings have been postponed several times. His most daring visions seem to disappear one after the other.

More and more, SpaceX – which was supposed to revolutionize space travel – looks like a more modest "disruptor". It is essentially a cheap supplier for NASA, offering some competition to Boeing and Lockheed.

There is nothing wrong with that. Boeing and Lockheed (and their joint venture United Launch Alliance) need some competition. (A funny fact for the layman: if you read an editorial attacking Musk and SpaceX, there is a good chance that one of these aerospace giants will be behind him.)

It's just that the "low-cost federal purchase option" does not exactly excite the pace or exalt the imagination, to borrow a phrase.

Musk is obviously not done. Far from there. And it is possible that he turns a billionaire on the moon in 2023, in which case he will really be this visionary of space. But from autumn 2018, this "real life Tony Stark" has fallen back to Earth.

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