President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk last week and watched his giant Starship rocket launch into space.
Trump was clearly impressed with the feat by Musk, whom he had just said has an IQ ‘about as high as they can get’.
The president-elect during his 2024 campaign went to great lengths to appeal to American voters – from serving at a McDonald’s to climbing into a garbage truck to defend his supporters. But would he ride a SpaceX rocket, an experience that wealthy private citizens have paid millions to do?
Trump’s eldest granddaughter Kai Trump, 17, who accompanied her grandpa to Texas to watch the launch, has the answer.
‘I asked grandpa, “Would you go in it?”‘ said Kai in a video on her YouTube channel uploaded on Tuesday.
‘And he goes, “No.” He would not volunteer going in the spaceship but it’s OK.’
Kai laughed and then asked her friend, Emma Markin, if she would go.
‘Go on it? Without a doubt. In a heartbeat, I’m on that,’ said Markin.
Kai herself said witnessing the rocket takeoff – though the booster did not return to the launch pad and instead into the Gulf of Mexico – was ‘honestly one of the coolest things ever’.
‘I’ve never seen something like that,’ she said. ‘And the noise of it, when it was going up. Insane.’
Though the president-elect is not up for what would be a historic presidential trip to space, his presence at Musk’s watch party signaled his growing relationship with the SpaceX founder.
Trump has already appointed Musk, who spent about $200million to help him defeat Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency.
Since Trump won the November election, Musk has frequently traveled with him, and the president-elect has even joked that he ‘can’t get him out of’ Mar-a-Lago.
Kai posted a photo of herself with Musk at one of Trump’s golf clubs and wrote that he was ‘achieving uncle status’.
A week before the SpaceX launch, Trump called Musk ‘a really good guy’ and expressed his gratitude.
‘He launched a rocket three weeks ago and then he went to Pennsylvania to campaign,’ Trump said, ‘Because he considered this more important than launching rockets that cost billions of dollars.’
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