On Tuesday (19^th November 2024), all eyes should have been fixed on the sky over a launchpad in Texas as the world’s largest rocket rose thunderously toward space. But the orbit presently getting the most attention is not in the heavens — it’s the increasingly intimate one back on our own planet Earth uniting the planet’s richest man and its soon-to-be-again most powerful man.

Tech magnate Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump — after trips to see Republicans in Washington and an Ultimate New York Fighting Championship match, including a mid-flight McDonald’s with a grimacing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — took to the road once again to watch Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket blast off on its latest test flight.

For once, Donald Trump’s hyperbole wasn’t over the top. “I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground,” he wrote on social media. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has spent the last fortnight basking in Trump’s reflected glory at Mar-a-Lago. He even made it into a picture of Donald Trump’s extended clan. He’s around so much it’s almost like he’s family. Now, it was opportune time for him to share some of his own aura with his new best friend.

In the anxious moments before the launch, several lesser satellites revolved around Donald Trump, including his son Donald Jr., Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician. But the president-elect seemed most animated when Elon Musk appeared and explained what would unfold when the rocket took off.

A bit of a disappointment

In the event, Donald Trump didn’t get to watch the ballistic ballet of SpaceX returning its huge booster to be clutched by a state-of-the-art launchpad that he babbled about on the campaign trail. “I see that fire pouring out the bottom of the rocket that’s coming in sideways and I say, ‘it’s going to crash into the gantry,’” Trump said earlier this very month. “And those two big beautiful arms they grab it — I said, ‘What the hell was that?’”

On Tuesday, mission controllers made a split-second decision instead to splash the giant Roman candle-like vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico following its slow-motion descent. “Maybe they just want to be careful not to kill the president-elect of the United States by any chance,” Greg Autry (associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida) told CNN.