Click the arrow to watch the interview. You may be subjected to an ad first.
Larry Kudlow of The Kudlow Report conducted a four-minute interview of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
The show's Twitter account sent out a tweet claiming:
Tonight on @CNBC: @ElonMusk, @SpaceX CEO, talks about the future and the business of Space travel. Don't miss that at 7p ET.
But after watching 20 minutes of drivel promoting Mitt Romney, we were finally told we had to go the CNBC web site to watch the interview.
You can watch the video embedded above, or click here to watch it on CNBC's web site.
Kudlow compared Musk and SpaceX to the moon colony proposal by Newt Gingrich, then later claimed he was kidding. Most of the interview was similarly clueless. But please feel free to watch and judge for yourself.
I'll close with the comment that falsehoods and misleading rhetoric spewed by people like Mr. Kudlow are one reason why so many Americans are under the mistaken impression that the U.S. human spaceflight program is over.
I'm 54, and am not an engineer or scientist. I've never been to Cape Canaveral and watched a launch in person. But I've been a space buff since childhood.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little too young to remember Project Mercury, but I still have the old Life magazines my parents bought which covered those flights. I remember playing hooky from school to watch Gemini launches. And of course I remember Apollo.
Skylab made some important strides in long-term space flight, and the Shuttle was a magnificent machine. But they were a bit of a letdown for me after Apollo, since I knew there were no longer any plans to go beyond Earth orbit.
Even the fact that we're temporarily reduced to buying rides from the Russians isn't all that bad. There was a six-year period from 1975-1981 when we had no means of sending Americans into orbit at all, and back then buying rides from the Russians was not an option. I remember when the Soviet space program was cloaked in extreme secrecy. Today American astronauts are flying on Soyuz spacecraft, those rockets bear American flags, and we can watch the launches live on the internet. All that was unthinkable in the 1970s. I consider that progress.
Looking at all of the companies that are building space hardware today, like SpaceX, Bigelow, Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, ATK, and anyone else I've forgotten; I'm more excited and optimistic about the future of space flight than at any time since the 1970s.
It's a shame that the MSM isn't giving the "New Space" companies the coverage they deserve. Many people are under the impression that American manned space flight has come to an end. If it weren't for the internet, I might believe that too. But I think the Space Age is just starting to get interesting.
(I'm sitting here typing this while wearing my brand new SpaceX/Dragon t-shirt, which just arrived today.)