Nearly 12 hours after the successful Falcon 9 launch of a Crew Dragon mission on Sept. 28, SpaceX announced there had been “an off-nominal deorbit burn” by the upper stage after deploying the Crew Dragon, which caused the stage to reenter outside the designated zone in the South Pacific. That grounded the rocket through at least Oct. 4, just as the company was preparing to launch time-critical missions like ESA’s Hera asteroid probe and NASA’s Europa Clipper.
Notably silent about this anomaly — the second in less than three months involving the Falcon 9 upper stage after years of problem-free flights — has been the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk. By comparison, during the earlier anomaly in July, he was providing updates on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter that he also owns, about the ultimately unsuccessful efforts to salvage the Starlink satellites stranded in a low orbit.
Politics over rockets
Musk has not been silent on X in general, with his posts currently dominated by political topics. When he has mentioned SpaceX in recent weeks, it has often been to complain about “lawfare” by the FAA (for delaying the license for the next Starship launch and fining SpaceX for other license violations) and the FCC (for revoking rural broadband subsidies for Starlink.) There’s been far less on other SpaceX activities, including the recent upper-stage anomaly.
Musk’s attention, of course, has long been divided, be it with electric automaker Tesla or smaller ventures like The Boring Company, Neuralink and now X. For years, other executives, like president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, have handled SpaceX’s day-to-day operations.
The public perception, though, based on his behavior on X, is that he seems less engaged with SpaceX than at any point in the 22 years since he founded the company. Even when the company stumbles, as it has with the latest upper-stage anomaly, he remains focused on political activism. He doesn’t offer the behavior you would expect from a CEO after this setback: more details about what happened, reassurances that the problem will be corrected, when the rocket will fly again.
Perhaps the political fever will break after the November elections and Musk will return to focus more on SpaceX. However, he has also mused about serving in a future Trump administration in some capacity, such as a ‘government efficiency’ commission, which would further drag him away from SpaceX.
Ambitious timelines
Musk, to be clear, still talks of making humanity multiplanetary and sending humans to Mars. He posted on X in September a plan to send five uncrewed Starships to Mars in the next launch window in 2026. “If those all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in four years,” he wrote, omitting details like life support systems and whether the crew would get a return trip.
That is a typically audacious goal from Musk, but his record shows how those schedules can slip. (In 2017, for example, he said at the International Astronautical Congress that SpaceX would launch the first human missions to Mars in 2024.) Moreover, in 2026 NASA will be eagerly awaiting SpaceX’s lunar Starship to land on the moon for the Artemis 3 mission (or at least an uncrewed precursor test flight) and presumably wouldn’t desire the distraction of a Mars launch campaign.
Even advocates of Musk take those plans with a grain of salt. In an exchange on X with John Carmack, the video game developer who ran suborbital spaceflight company Armadillo Aerospace for several years, Musk declared that Starship “should be doing >1000 Earth orbit flights per year by 2028.” That would be several times the total number of orbital launches worldwide projected for 2024.
Carmack was skeptical. That flight rate, he wrote, “sounds less likely than boots on Mars in 2030 — both plausible, but aggressively optimistic!”
“I do expect to see both,” Carmack concluded of both 1,000 Starship launches a year and humans on Mars, “just a little later.” Unless, though, Musk is further distracted by social media, politics or other interests.
This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
