The Chinese space station of Tiangong was forced to change its orbit due to two close encounters with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. On Chinese social media all the indignation of users.
Elon Musk: drop in popularity due to a (near) incident with Starlink
You can’t be nice to everyone. Apparently Elon Musk, leading American billionaire of Tesla e SpaceX, is not particularly well regarded in China. The reason? One of its satellites Starlink – which we tried here anyway – would have forced twice there Chinese space station Tiangong, to change its course to avoid what would have been a catastrophic collision. The two events date back precisely to July and October, but Chinese public opinion was unleashed only starting this month, after the two (almost) incidents were made public in a Beijing report to the United Nations. To report it is Al Jazeera, confirming that the reputation of SpaceX, and its owner, has come out quite dented by this event.
The anger of Chinese online users was expressed mainly on social media, where the hashtags against Elon Musk and Starlink got 87 million views.
“It is ironic that the Chinese buy Tesla, contributing large sums of money so that Musk can launch Starlink, and then [quasi] crash into the Chinese space station, ”commented one user. Then there are those who promote a boycott of Tesla and those who hypothesize possible sanctions by Washington, if it were Beijing that put the International Space Station at risk.
SpaceX, based in California, has not formally responded to what happened at the moment. It must be said that Tesla is extremely popular in China, where sells about one in four of its cars. The company is also building a rare wholly owned factory in Shanghai.