That’s the face of a man who is clearly very impressed with himself.
Elon Musk has many reasons to feel chuffed.
His new rocket, Starship, was recently unveiled and he has big plans for it going forward.
He spoke about those plans in an interview at the unveiling, where he couldn’t help taking a dig at NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.
To be fair, according to CNET, Bridenstine started it with the following tweet:
If you don’t speak nerd, this should clear things up.
Commercial Crew involves SpaceX and Boeing developing spacecraft that can ferry astronauts from US soil to the International Space Station.
Musk addressed the NASA head’s gentle parental nagging during his Starship update from Texas Saturday, saying, “From a SpaceX resource standpoint, our resources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon (Crew Dragon is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program) … It was really quite a small percentage of SpaceX that did Starship.”
He then turned it up a bit in an offstage interview. Skip ahead to 1:44 for the moment Elon throws shade:
Looks like he’s getting revenge for that asteroid-related drama back in August.
Again, to decode the nerd-speak and discover the burn beneath, here’s CNET:
The joke here is that Musk is referring to NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System, which is over budget and years overdue. So much so, in fact, that there’s been talk of NASA just cutting its losses, canceling SLS and contracting with SpaceX for future SLS launches, like the planned Artemis mission to return to the moon.
“Everything in aerospace is years behind, OK?” Musk went on to say. “Relatively speaking, which one is more late … we’re really going as fast as we can make it go.”
Bridenstine responded with the following:
“Administrator Bridenstine is working to make the agency and its commercial partners accountable for cost and schedule, in addition to safely carrying out NASA’s missions. Bridenstine continues to emphasize that the return of launches of American astronauts, on American rockets and spacecraft, from American soil should be the top priority for NASA’s Commercial Crew partners.”
Burn..?
I don’t know any longer.
[source:cnet]
