Read The Full Article On: Space
It was a good comeback, though you couldn’t exactly call it snappy.
“The trampoline is working!” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday (May 30), shortly after the company launched its first crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
Musk was referring to an April 2014 barb by Dimitry Rogozin, who at the time was Russia’s deputy prime minister. Today, Rogozin is the chief of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos.
Dear @JimBridenstine, it’s safe to congratulate you at this point with a successful launch and docking. Bravo! I know how anxious you were for this major event to become a success. I wish @NASA team to successfully finish up reconstructing its national space transportation systemДмитрий Рогозин✔@Rogozin
…to the #ISS.
Please convey my sincere greetings to @elonmusk (I loved his joke) and @SpaceX team. Looking forward to further cooperation!@Rogozin @JimBridenstine @roscosmos @NASA2,830Twitter Ads info and privacy465 people are talking about this
Rogozin took the Demo-2 success, and Musk’s trampoline riposte, in stride. The Russian official congratulated NASA chief Jim Bridenstine via Twitter Sunday and wished NASA luck in getting commercial crew missions officially up and running.
“Please convey my sincere greetings to @elonmusk (I loved his joke) and @SpaceX team. Looking forward to further cooperation!” Rogozin added in another Tweet (in English).
Musk responded to this tweet with one of his own, in Russian. The English translation, via Google Translate: “Thanks sir, haha. We look forward to mutually beneficial and prosperous long-term cooperation.”
Demo-2 is scheduled to last one to four months; NASA and SpaceX have not yet decided on the mission’s duration. If everything goes well through splashdown, SpaceX’s first contracted astronaut-carrying mission, called Crew-1, could launch as soon as late August, NASA officials have said.
Boeing isn’t quite ready to launch astronauts yet. Starliner failed to meet up with the ISS as planned on an uncrewed test flight this past December. The capsule will refly that test mission before proceeding to crewed flight.