Elon Musk: brilliant on space, wasting his time on Twitter
It’s the stuff of lunchtime arguments among students in the pub. Which is the harder discipline: science or the humanities? It is also a question that has never had a clear answer, until, perhaps, these last few months when Elon Musk has proved that being extremely good at the former has no bearing on the latter.
Musk has recently become distracted at a time when he should have things to celebrate. Just this week, the FDA released its long-awaited environmental review into SpaceX’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, as well as its long-term plans to launch and land its “Starship” vehicle around, on, and (probably) in the Gulf of Mexico. Except for a few caveats requiring special protection of the sea turtles and other wildlife, the report gave SpaceX the conditional green light to go ahead with launches, which Musk now says will begin in July and become monthly from later in the year.
From a scientific/engineering perspective, these are exciting times. We might well be about to see the world’s biggest rocket take off and, even more miraculously, land. Forget what you remember about the gigantic Apollo rockets that took Man to the Moon. Starship will carry significantly larger cargoes into space at significantly lower costs. To add to the feeling of entering a new golden age for the space industry, the biggest part of the rocket (the so-called booster stage), which traditionally would have been single-use and dumped into the sea, will return to the launch tower where a pair of enormous robotic arms will attempt to catch the booster before resetting it back on the launch pad. It’s one of those stories you probably don’t read much about (if you read about it all) but will create global headlines the first time it’s attempted.
Yet if Musk is earning his reputation as a modern Howard Hughes, he is also cultivating the less salubrious parts of the former billionaire’s myth. Instead of obsessing over Jane Russell’s breasts (Hughes famously applied aerospace techniques to design a push-up bra for the actress), Musk is getting involved with Twitter where he is expressing some opinions that have led some to question his focus.
This isn’t to say everything he says is a surprise. It should be no shock to learn that the world’s richest man is a capitalist, with ideas about workers’ rights that some might find questionable. Left-leaning commentators simply condemn him for being rich. Defenders naively point out that he works extremely long hours and expects those people he hires to work extremely hard. Around that, however, is all the rest: sexual harassment allegations that he denies, questions about stock trades, playing footsie with China’s hard-line regime, and, most obvious of all, why on earth he thinks buying Twitter will be a good idea.
As an engineer, he has always appeared singularly focussed on making humanity a multi-planet species. He talks about it in nearly every interview regarding SpaceX. He believes that only he can make it possible because only he has the determination and (obviously) the finances. That drive explains the pace of SpaceX’s growth. Just a short year ago, it landed its first test vehicle. In the past twelve months, the firm has worked night and day building out the site at Boca Chica (and a second site at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida) that aims to produce a constant supply of launch vehicles capable of reaching orbit and beyond. At times, the work seems too fast to be sensible, but SpaceX’s rapid prototyping methods have already been proven to work. The team builds a rocket crudely at first, launches it, and sees what happens. They then adjust their designs and repeat. In the short term, newspapers mock the spectacular explosions and the supposed hubris of the man who believes he can solve problems that have eluded generations of space engineers. In the long term, however, SpaceX might well have a product as successful as its Falcon 9, already the world’s more reliable and successful launch platform.
It’s this backstory that makes Musk’s involvement in Twitter so disappointing, but not simply because it’s a distraction that undermines his reputation as one of those ground-breaking thinkers of the century.
Free speech has troubled thinkers for centuries and the riddle is no closer to being solved. When Musk takes to Twitter to claim that he is a “free speech absolutist”, one wonders if he’s given it as much thought as he has his new Raptor engines. Does he really mean “absolute” or does he limit only some kinds of speech? What about Musk’s attempts to shut down criticism of his Tesla cars, whose self-driving “AI” has been cited in numerous accidents and makes philosophy’s infamous Trolley Problem a pressing concern for lawmakers everywhere? Musk doesn’t enter into debates beyond perfunctory memes and sometimes unnecessary insults against his detractors. He instead plays fast and loose with facts, accusing Twitter of having a left-wing bias, which might or might not be true. Young engineers living in California might well be Democrats more than they are Republicans, but repeated studies have shown how social media’s algorithms tend to amplify right-wing voices. He has also promised to reinstate Donald Trump to Twitter (which might help Democrats but, equally, might not) and has argued that his centrism only looks right-wing because the Left has moved further to the left. Recent politics would suggest, conversely, that both the Republican Party in the US and the Conservatives in the UK, have morphed into populist parties that occupy a place much further to the right.
In other words: none of this is simple, which should be the tagline of the humanities where problems are rarely solved by swapping out parts and improving designs. Certainly, as Musk might well be learning, putting humans on Mars is not the hardest problem awaiting a solution.