“What is Starlink?” Trump Talks Elon Musk, Starship and SpaceX in Election Night Victory Speech (Video)

by Junna Base November 13, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump praised Elon Musk and SpaceX in his victory speech on election night.

In a speech broadcast on Tuesday evening (November 5), Trump recalled watching the latest and fifth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, as well as his conversations with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about the use of the Starlink The company’s satellites in North Carolina following deadly impacts from Hurricane Helene.

“And I called Elon. I said, ‘Elon, was that you?’ He said, ‘Yes, it was.’ I said, ‘Who else can do it?’ ‘No. Can China do it?’ “No,” Trump said in the speech, recalling the recent Starship test in which the giant rocket was caught by the “rod” arms on SpaceX’s launch tower. “‘Can the United States do it but you?’ “No, no one can. I said, ‘That’s why I love you, Elon, that’s great.'”

Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump during a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, on Saturday, October 5, 2024. (Image credit: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Trump said he had to put a donor on hold for 45 minutes while he watched the test flight, which he thought was a “space-age movie or something.”

The president-elect then recalled calling Musk after Hurricane Helene, after receiving multiple inquiries about the use of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which have been used to provide vital communications services following natural disasters and conflicts around the world. Following the devastating hurricanes Helene and Milton, SpaceX made Starlink broadband services available to all users living in areas affected by the storms for free for the remainder of 2024, aside from hardware costs.

“People from North Carolina came to me and said, ‘Would it even be possible for you to talk to Elon Musk? We need Starlink,'” Trump said during his victory speech, adding, “I said, ‘What is Starlink?’ ?’”

“What the hell is that?” Trump said when he asked Musk about Starlink. “He said, ‘It’s a communication system that’s very good.’ I said, ‘Elon, they really, really need it in North Carolina. Can you get it?’”

“He got it there so quickly. “It was unbelievable,” Trump said. “So, and it was great. It has saved many lives. He saved many lives. But he is a character. He’s a special guy. He’s a super genius. We must protect our geniuses. We don’t have that.” Many of them we have to.

Musk supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Trump’s administration has pushed hard for the deregulation of US industry, an issue on which Musk and SpaceX took vocal positions during the test campaign of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

Musk called for the resignation of Michael Whitaker from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in September after the FAA fined SpaceX for two launch violations. In response, SpaceX threatened to sue the FAA for “regulatory overreach.”

Trump has praised his achievements in American spaceflight for years, saying one of his proudest achievements in his first term was the creation of the US Space Force. In 2020, Trump’s campaign released a 2.5-minute video called “Make Space Great Again” that celebrated his administration’s role in the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, the first orbital manned spaceflight launched by the United States States from since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet was launched in 2011.

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