Elon Musk’s 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 Musk’s 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 company’s 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 emerging 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 I’m sure we would have spent a lot of time going into that. … But it wasn’t really about that.”
The film’s primary focus is on the first crewed mission for SpaceX in 2020, which aims to send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. NASA hadn’t 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 company’s Crew Dragon space capsule into orbit. And to Musk himself as the launch neared and the rocket took off.
In Return to Space, Musk appeared 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. There’s 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 they’re just so notoriously, I don’t 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 understands the value of this type of storytelling.”
The filmmakers sprinkle some wonderful human touches throughout, including Bridenstine’s 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 company’s 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. “It’s kind of fast and furious compared to how people traditionally talk about work and development in space travel.”
