Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk as an excellent individual and gifted businessman, simply days after the chief govt officer of SpaceX acknowledged stopping Ukraine from utilizing his firm’s Starlink satellite tv for pc community for an assault on Russian warships.
“As for personal enterprise, Elon Musk, he’s definitely an excellent individual,” Putin stated on the Japanese Financial Discussion board in Vladivostok on Tuesday. “I feel it is going to be acknowledged all through the world. He’s an lively, gifted businessman.”
Putin’s compliments got here after Musk posted on X, his social media community previously often known as Twitter, on Sept. 7 about his determination to reject an emergency request from Ukrainian authorities to activate Starlink towards Sevastopol, the port metropolis in Crimea.
Granting permission, Musk stated, would have made SpaceX “explicitly complicit in a serious act of warfare and battle escalation.”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s black sea peninsula Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February final yr.
Noting SpaceX receives help from the US authorities, Putin stated Russia was open to involving non-public traders in its house business and vowed to proceed Russia’s efforts to discover the moon regardless of final month’s failure of the Luna-25 mission.
NASA makes use of SpaceX rockets to take individuals to the Worldwide House Station and is working with Musk’s firm as a part of the Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon.
Russia’s robotic spacecraft crashed whereas trying to land close to the moon’s south pole in August, failing in a race with India to turn out to be the primary nation to succeed in the area. The touchdown would have marked Moscow’s return to the moon practically half a century after the final Soviet mission.
Putin reminded listeners Tuesday that different international house applications have confronted failures too.
“It is a pity, after all, that the lunar touchdown failed. However this doesn’t imply that we are going to shut this program,” he stated. “We’ll proceed working.”
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by Ednbox employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
