Like many people this weekend, I couldn’t tear myself away from videos of the booster rocket of Elon Musk’s Starship shrieking back to earth, to be clutched in the giant ‘chopstick’ arms of a towering metallic cradle. I must have watched it now about 50 times from varying angles. The most impressive are the videos recorded at a distance on ordinary phones. The thing thunders down like a missile launch on a strip of film run backwards, and there’s a tantalising moment at the very end where you think it’s going to miss. Then it rights itself with a neat little manoeuvre, like an Edwardian gent straightening his cravat before he steps into his club.
Starship rocket booster caught by tower pic.twitter.com/aOQmSkt6YE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 13, 2024
I haven’t ever felt this moved by a tech event before. The big achievements of technology have been for most of my life small, interior, or of dubious worth. Their most notable characteristic has been the exhaust trail of unintended consequences in their wake; a production line of little gadgets that were supposed to make life easier and simpler, but which instead dumped a whole new set of difficulties and complexities upon us. The most notable feature of the recent showstopping iPhone update, for example, is a function that makes individual words in a text go big or small or wobble or throb, should you so desire. Its amusement value lasts a good 40 seconds, tops.
The Starship booster return was quite different. It was a demonstration of expertise, competence, excellence, an achievement of pioneering spirit and vast ambition.
The contrast between that and our usual cultural milieu was made more poignant by the fact that Elon Musk had not been invited to the Labour government’s grand investment summit. Labour reportedly decided not to ask the richest man in the world ‘due to his social posts’ during the summer riots.
This is a pose worthy of the 1980s student union where the Prime Minister’s puerile prejudices were incubated. Compare the swoop and the grandeur of SpaceX to the petty, noodling nonsense of Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy, and it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t want a proficient person to show up and show them up.
Another striking thing about the launch was its reminder of how visions of the future go in and out of fashion. I just about caught, in very early childhood, the fag-end of the Space Age. But the pages of school library books that rhapsodised about the interplanetary future – ‘you might even meet an alien!’ I remember one exalting – were already faded and foxed by the time I got to them.
It wasn’t until very much later that I realised how mind-bogglingly epochal the moon landing had been; I had grown up with it as a background detail, a second hand 1960s cultural memory, like the Beatles or people thinking Engelbert Humperdinck was sexy.
The tangible magnificence of the booster’s return is a rebuke to the frivolousness of the human race
Musk’s often-repeated reason for doing this space stuff – along with his ventures into AI and his Optimus robots – is to preserve the human race by spreading it far and wide across the stars. These are the dreams of the archetypal nerdy 14-year-old. But surely this is why we have such people? The idea of an insurance policy from a precarious future – that we need humans on other planets if this one goes tits up – is so epic that only somebody who wasn’t psychologically quite ‘right’ would have it, let alone carry it to such incredible lengths.
Those robots, which Musk unveiled a few days earlier in all their uncanny walking and talking glory, were another gobsmacker. And yet I found myself being quite blasé about them. I think this is because we’ve become accustomed to robots because they’re always on television nowadays, along with other formerly quite exotic things like chefs and homosexuals.
By contrast, the tangible magnificence of the booster’s return is a rebuke to the frivolousness of the human race. We now all have devices that give us instant access to all the information which has ever been available. We could have used them to become gods. But no, we create TikTok videos of us inhaling laughing gas, or we pick fights with strangers on distant continents about whether men can be women. We are a deeply daft species with only moments of splendour.
It’s poetically appropriate that Musk has a foot in both camps, launching a mission to Mars while posting edgy memes on the social platform he owns. The grip of the giant chopsticks is a reminder that trivial human beings can do amazing things.