In a press release published Sunday morning, SpaceX announced the details of their newest mission to space: “Challenger 2: The One Where It Gets There”. Later that day Stanford dropout and SpaceX owner Elon Musk held an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit to field questions about the mission, where he also shared a self-made claymation video of the 1983 Challenger disaster titled “wasteddd.mov.”
When asked by user FallOpium_t00bs about why SpaceX decided to embark on such an ambitious project, Musk pointed to the desire of the American people for a second go-around.
“Finally, a question not about my piss kink…look, entrepreneurship is all about taking a product and refining it based on audience feedback until you get it just right,” Musk said. “The consensus seems to be that America’s least favorite thing about the Challenger was that it fucking exploded, so I thought hey, what if I built one that didn’t do that?”
Getting this project off the ground was by no means an easy feat, with stakeholders and government officials such as Senator Bernie Sanders expressing concern about the ethical and practical nature of the launch. After hours of heated debate, however, they capitulated when Musk promised to launch every DVD copy of the movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (1998) into space on the rocket, hopefully to never return.
Originally scheduled for launch in June, the team has been able to push launch up to March 14th, 2021, by overlooking some of the less important but time-consuming details like the foolproof rubber O-ring seals and seatbelts. The five passengers piloting the rocket will be chosen by Musk 2 weeks before the launch by throwing darts a current list of all SpaceX employees. Current models provided by the company predict a mission success rate of 98.2%, which SpaceX astrophysicist Bill Hung points out is “98.2% better odds than the first time.”
