Elon Musk Likes Twitter, But Space Exploration Is His Real Love, As Seen In Netflix Doc ‘Return To Space’

deadline.com:

Elon Musk’s successful takeover bid for Twitter has raised concerns about his plans for the social media platform, because of his political views.

Historically those views have teetered left and right, but tend to gravitate towards libertarian. His anti-union stance as CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla has displeased liberals, even if they constitute his best automotive customers.Objections to The Boring Company, his venture that proposes to build underground transportation networks beneath cities, fall not on ideological grounds but practical ones: some civil engineers just call it pie in the sky.But there is one skyward thrust of Musk’s sci-tech empire that attracts almost universal praise – the aerospace enterprise SpaceX.

The Netflix documentary Return to Space, directed by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, chronicles the company’s development of a recyclable rocket and its collaboration with NASA to get this country back into human space exploration.“Space is his best look,” Vasarhelyi says of Musk, tacitly acknowledging his controversial profile that includes expressing doubts about Covid vaccine mandates and hanging out with pal Joe Rogan, the podcaster who has admitted to past use of racist language. “If we were doing just an Elon Musk documentary I’m sure we would have spent a lot of time going into that… But it wasn’t really about that.”The film’s primary focus is on the first crewed mission for SpaceX in 2020, which aimed to send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station.

NASA hadn’t put any astronauts into space since the last Shuttle flight in 2011. Vasarhelyi and Chin secured remarkable access to document the process, including the crew preparing