Elon Musk gives befitting reply to Roscosmos chief's 'broomstick' jibe with SpaceX launch

Responding to Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin's 'broomstick' remark with actions, tech mogul Elon Musk has given a befitting reply with his latest success on Thursday. Musk's aerospace enterprise SpaceX launched 47 new Starlink satellites earlier today just hours after Rogozin stated that Russia will no longer deliver its rocket engines to the US due to the sanctions and they can instead use broomsticks for flying. Speaking in an interview with a state-owned channel, the Roscosmos head had said, "In a situation like this, we cannot supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what".

Irked by his statement, Musk later replied to a SpaceX clip about today's launch with four US flag emoticons and a sarcastic "American Broomstick" as a caption. 

However, this is not the first time Musk confronted Rogozin for his brash comments. Earlier on Thursday, Rogozin had protested against Musk helping out Ukraine by offering internet services through Starlink in the region. "When Russia implements its highest national interests on the territory of Ukraine, @elonmusk appears with his Starlink which was previously declared as purely civilian. Here is this mud (мурло) opened himself", Rogozin had said in an interview. In response, Musk wrote in his tweet, "Ukraine civilian Internet was experiencing strange outages – bad weather perhaps? – so SpaceX is helping fix it".

Russia takes Ukraine crisis to space

The Russian space agency is ending ties with every major space agency one after another with the recent being the German space agency. Roscosmos, on Thursday, announced that it is ending its cooperation with Germany for joint experiments that were planned to be conducted on the Russian side of the International Space Station. The agency said that it would now conduct all those experiments independently. In response, the German space agency also stated that it is ending bilateral relations with Russia will not involve in any operations with the latter in the future. 

Apart from Germany, Russia has also pushed away NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) in retaliation to the sanctions imposed on it by both the US and European countries. 

Image: AP/Twitter/@SpaceX