09/13/2025

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By Dan Robitzski

Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.

The grief of a fandom: on Starship, Musk and losing the spark

Space historian and podcaster Emily Carney wrote a fascinating article putting words to the difficult feelings that she and other longtime space fans felt after the most recent and mostly successful Starship test flight. She describes how the usual excitement surrounding a launch was marred by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's behavior this year, from his Nazi salute at President Trump's inauguration, the xenophobia that's run rampant on his X platform and the damage he's done to U.S. space policy, including how his fallout with Trump may have left NASA without a permanent administrator.

Here's how Carney described the challenge of fandom amidst those moments:

Why do people defend someone who has done things that are frankly terrible? Is it because they're fans of what the person has previously done? Is it a matter of identity and self-concept ("I'm a fan of this and it defines me")? Is it cognitive dissonance? Is it social pressure from fellow SpaceX fans, or a bias? Or is it because they've already emotionally invested themselves in SpaceX, and simply are hopeful and optimistic? Many of Musk's earlier fans who now understandably deride him previously supported him because his ideas about off-world space settlement resembled influential futurist Gerard K. O'Neill's, at least on a surface level, and somewhat mirrored O'Neill's 1970s brand of optimism and better living through tech. All these things populated my mind as I tried to understand why so many of us are excusing the actual harm someone has directly done to our society, economy, and culture.

You can read the full opinion article here.

Sending astronauts to the moon and Mars must be more than a photo op

Any mission to the moon and Mars — crewed, robotic or both — that does not put scientific goals and discoveries at the forefront, would be a missed opportunity, wrote Scott Hubbard, former Director of NASA's Ames Research Center and Mars Program Director, and Mars researcher and MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky, in an opinion article that warned against pursuing missions just for optics.

Here's what they had to say:

Over three administrations, the NASA justification for sending humans into space has been a triad of co-equal components — scientific exploration of the world around us; inspiring us with "audacious challenges" that excite young people and draws them into scientific and technical fields; and creating a national posture that allows us to develop new technologies and businesses and to exert leadership and influence around the world. The current structure of the human moon and Mars program has not integrated science in an effective way into the planning process, but there still is time to make that happen.

Hubbard and Jakosky go on to argue that a combination of human and robotic efforts are necessary to achieve the planetary science goals that should be at the forefront of these missions.

We have the opportunity to design and implement the moon and Mars programs so that they will contribute substantially to all of NASA's goals for exploration of the solar system. We shouldn't sell the program short by stove-piping the human program as being separate from the robotic program or by cutting science to below a viable level. If we do, we'll get cool photographs from Mars but little else.

You can see the full article here.

Starship launches through heavy fog. Credit: nader saremi on Unsplash

Abolishing the UK's independent space agency could be a mistake

The U.K. government made headlines recently when it announce that it would fold the UK Space Agency (UKSA) into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), raising questions about country's future commitments to space as others forge ahead. Victoria Pearson, co-founder and managing director of the communications consultancy Sonder London, wrote an opinion article warning that this move could be a mistake for the U.K.

Here's what Pearson felt the decision puts at risk:

I don't want to suggest that this decision was taken lightly. And there are compelling arguments in support for bringing the UKSA into the fold of the DSIT. But there are still real risks to doing so. First among these concerns the loss of the UKSA's independence. As an independent entity, it's been able to speak with clarity and authority on its own behalf and behalf of the sector. That autonomy has signaled to the world that the U.K. takes space seriously — seriously enough to grant the sector its own decision-making power and a means of self-coordination and self-governance. As a communications professional, I'm conscious of how much image you present to the world matters. The government, I'm sure, is taking space as seriously as it was before — perhaps even more seriously. But it doesn't look that way, and that has repercussions.

Pearson went on to argue that the move risks "limit[ing U.K.] talent, pushing it away, or denying it the support it needs."

You can read the rest of the article here.

SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors.

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