[imagesource: Steve Nesius/ Reuters]
After weeks of being in the news for all the wrong reasons, Elon Musk celebrated a SpaceX/NASA collaboration that saw the historic launch of the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon into orbit.
After a 19 hour flight, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley successfully docked at the International Space Station marking the first successful space mission on a commercial spacecraft.
Naturally, Musk was “overcome with emotion” when the launch took place over the weekend, writes SPACE.com.
Once he’d calmed down, he decided to introduce a little humour into the situation with a joke that left most people scratching their heads.
Watch as Elon confuses everyone before laughing at his own quip:
Yeah, that wasn’t awkward at all.
So what does “the trampoline is working” actually mean?
Musk was referring to an April 2014 barb by Dimitry Rogozin, who at the time was Russia’s deputy prime minister. Today, Rogozin is the chief of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos.
Rogozin was irked back then by sanctions imposed by the United States in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some of those sanctions targeted the Russian space industry (as well as individuals, including Rogozin), and Rogozin argued that the measures would end up hurting NASA and the global space effort in general.
To be fair, America has relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to train and transport its astronauts since it retired its space shuttles in 2011.
Here’s where the trampoline comes in:
“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline,” Rogozin said.
Now that astronauts are lifting off from US soil, the trampoline, in Musk’s words, is working.
He must have been sitting on that one for a long time.
He scores some major points for the long game.
His quip didn’t go unnoticed. Rogozin responded on Twitter in good humour, revealing that he was the one sharing the inside joke with Musk:
In acknowledgement of Rogozin’s English Tweet, Musk responded in Russian:
Loosely translated, that reads:
“Thanks Sir, haha. We look forward to mutually beneficial and prosperous long-term cooperation”.
For once, the world need not be terrified of a collaboration between Russia and America, or a tweet from Elon.
Space, bringing people together…
[source:space]
