When the Russians said that after all of the sanctions levied against them that the US will have to get to space “on broomsticks,” Elon Musk flipped Putin a rocket-sized bird and basically said, “oh yeah, I got your broomstick right here!”
The SpaceX CEO took a jab at Russia’s recent suggestion the US would have to get to space on broomsticks after the sale of Russian rocket engines was halted in response to the sanctions against Russia the US imposed for Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said that Russia would no longer supply rocket engines to the US after President Joe Biden’s sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
“In a situation like this, we can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines,” Rogozin said on state-run TV. “Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.”
Hours after Rogozin’s comments, SpaceX launched 47 of its own Starlink satellites into orbit using the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Musk responded to Rogozin’s “broomstick” comment by tweeting a video of SpaceX’s launch on Twitter with a screenshot of Rogozin’s comments highlighted along with the words “American Broomstick” and four US flags.
It’s not the first time Musk has confronted Rogozin.
When Rogozin criticized Musk for offering Starlink internet in Ukraine, Musk tweeted: “Ukraine civilian Internet was experiencing strange outages – bad weather perhaps? – so SpaceX is helping fix it.”
After Starlink went live in Ukraine over the weekend, one engineer told Insider that he was using the system for emergencies in case his regular internet connection was cut off.
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, now has more than 2,000 satellites in orbit. Musk warned Starlink users in Ukraine to turn on the system “only when needed” because they could be targeted amid the invasion.
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