Elon Musk Likes Twitter, But Space Exploration Is His Real Love, As Seen In Netflix Doc Return To Space – Deadline

Elon Musks successful takeover bid for Twitter has raised concerns about his plans for the social media platform, because of his political views. Historically those views have teetered left and right, but tend to gravitate towards libertarian. His anti-union stance as CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla has displeased liberals, even if they constitute his best automotive customers.

Objections to The Boring Company, his venture that proposes to build underground transportation networks beneath cities, fall not on ideological grounds but practical ones: some civil engineers just call it pie in the sky.

But there is one skyward thrust of Musks sci-tech empire that attracts almost universal praise the aerospace enterprise SpaceX. The Netflix documentary Return to Space, directed by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, chronicles the companys development of a recyclable rocket and its collaboration with NASA to get this country back into human space exploration.

Space is his best look, Vasarhelyi says of Musk, tacitly acknowledging his controversial profile that includes expressing doubts about Covid vaccine mandates and hanging out with pal Joe Rogan, the podcaster who has admitted to past use of racist language. If we were doing just an Elon Musk documentary Im sure we would have spent a lot of time going into that. But it wasnt really about that.

The films primary focus is on the first crewed mission for SpaceX in 2020, which aimed to send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. NASA hadnt put any astronauts into space since the last Shuttle flight in 2011. Vasarhelyi and Chin secured remarkable access to document the process, including the crew preparing for the mission and then the blastoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which propelled the companys Crew Dragon space capsule into orbit. And to Musk himself as the launch neared and the rocket took off.

In Return to Space, Musk appears intimately engaged in the details of the SpaceX-NASA mission not surprising, given that he is not only the CEO of SpaceX, but also its chief engineer. He hovers in the background at times, in a black sports coat, or inserts himself occasionally to inquire about technical points or to receive updates on the weather forecast before launch. Theres a faint resemblance to Hugo Drax of Moonraker, if only because of the common space theme and both characters immense wealth.

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There was reason for Musk to feel comfortable with the filmmakers.

We had friends in common with Elon. We had spent some time together with him [previously], Vasarhelyi notes. SpaceX [access] was a thing, but the real kind of achievement, in many ways, was that NASA access because theyre just so notoriously, I dont know, controlling They ended up making the kind of accommodations that they normally never make.

The directors were permitted to use footage that Behnken and Hurley shot themselves. And they spent considerable time with then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

I think we got lucky with Bridenstine because he was the first civilian administrator [of NASA], Vasarhelyi says. He let us shadow him. I think he understood the value of this type of storytelling.

The filmmakers sprinkle some wonderful human touches throughout, including Bridenstines fondness for a certain kind of caffeine-powered soda.

We could always curry favor with him by bringing him Mountain Dew, Vasarhelyi shares. Like, who knew?

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Many at the time scoffed at the idea of a commercial outfit manufacturing rockets for NASA use, including no less a figure than Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Critics may have felt they had correctly foreseen the folly of SpaceX when the companys early efforts to create the Falcon rocket ended in spectacular explosions. But that was part of the process.

SpaceX really came at it with this basically new school startup mentality where it was, Fail fast and fail early and learn from your failures, Chin explains. Its kind of fast and furious compared to how people traditionally approached work and development in space travel.

Musk and his aeronautical engineers came up with other innovations besides the rocket itself; they also developed an escape system allowing astronauts in their capsule to separate from the booster rocket, in case of catastrophe after liftoff.

The inherent risk of space flight unites Return to Space with the earlier work of Chin and Vasarhelyi. In The Rescue, they documented the perilous effort to save children trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand; the Academy Award-winning Free Solo tracked climber Alex Honnold as he attempted to ascend Yosemites El Capitan granite rock face without aid of ropes. The rescuers who saved the Thai kids soberly assessed whether their intended plans could work; Honnold choreographed every inch of his climb to lessen the chance of a fatal plunge.

Its a familiar space or terrain for us to examine the process of risk assessment and calculation and mitigation. The heart of any high stakes situation is there is the stakes of the mission, but theres also the stakes of life and death, Chin observes. You have to have a true passion and belief in what youre doing when youre in that situation where you are calculating life and death risks. And thats really interesting to us because thats a look into why people do what they do, and then it also looks at the process.

The mission with Behnken and Hurley came off without a hitch. Earlier this month, SpaceX again in collaboration with NASA launched a former NASA astronaut and three paying customers to the ISS.

The mission is the first to go to the space station on which all of the passengers are private citizens, and it is the first time that NASA has collaborated in arranging a space tourism visit, The New York Times reported on April 8. The flight marked a pivotal moment in efforts to spur space travel by commercial enterprises, NASA officials said.

(If Musk had one eye on the launch, the other was on Twitter. On April 4 it was revealed he had bought a 9 percent stake in the company. On April 9, a day after the latest SpaceX blastoff, he announced he would not seek a seat on Twitters board. Then on April 14 he offered $43 billion to buy Twitter; today a deal was announced that would see him acquire the company for $44 billion).

At one point in Return to Space, Musk sports a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, Occupy Mars. He has articulated an outsized vision not only for SpaceX but for the human race. That would include a return to Earths only natural satellite, most recently visited by Apollo astronauts in late 1972.

Its been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. Thats too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon, Musk said last April. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species.

Vasarhelyi remarks, [Musk] truly believes in these ideas of consciousness, civilization and thinking about these questions.

But as for setting up house on the Red Planet, Vasarhelyi, for one, counts herself out.

I think life on Mars, the filmmaker says, sounds incredibly unpleasant.

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Elon Musk Likes Twitter, But Space Exploration Is His Real Love, As Seen In Netflix Doc Return To Space - Deadline