It's not hard to see why those onetime SpaceX-watchers feel so crestfallen, given that Musk's horrendous politics quite literally have a death toll. Thanks to the billionaire's draconian cuts to grants for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during his time in Donald Trump's White House, an estimated 360,000 people have already died from starvation and lack of medication, and an additional 14 million lives could be lost should those cuts be codified and extended through 2030, per a new study in The Lancet, an esteemed medical journal.
With the USAID cuts alone being enough for any avowed SpaceX-watcher to turn their back on the Musk-owned company, there are plenty of other reasons for people like Carney — whose book "Star Bound," co-written with space scion Bruce McCandless III, details the history of NASA's spaceflight program — to grieve.
"When asked by some why I felt a lack of interest in [the latest launch of] Starship, I pointed out Musk’s January gesture, which to me could not be mistaken as anything other than what it appeared to be: a Nazi salute," she wrote of the CEO's infamous Sieg Heil at Trump's inauguration. "I saw this happen with my eyes."
Add in Musk's racism, anti-Semitism, and "white genocide" outbursts, and you have a wannabe spaceman who "never had to enter himself into US politics and space policy," Carney wrote, instead choosing to enter that fray and irreparably harm NASA and the US space program along the way.
As for erstwhile SpaceX fans, that hurts.
"A considerable part of the space fandom is experiencing a specific kind of grief," she wrote, "when the thing you most enjoyed is now associated with other things that are irretrievably dark."
More on Musk's public: Elon Musk Appears to Now Be the Most Hated Person in America, According to New Research
https://futurism.com/spacex-launch-fans-grief
