SpaceX launched its Starship rocket system on its sixth test flight Tuesday, with Donald Trump in attendance at the company’s Texas launchpad.

Trump’s presence underscores the close ties SpaceX owner Elon Musk has established with the president-elect after pouring more than $100 million into his campaign.

The nearly 400-foot-tall structure — which features the Starship spacecraft stacked on top of a Super Heavy booster — lifted off flawlessly at 2 p.m. Pacific Standard Time from Starbase, the company’s Brownsville, Texas-area facility next to the Gulf of Mexico. The uncrewed spacecraft was sent on its way to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, while the booster returned to earth less than seven minutes later.

The booster completed a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico but was unable to complete a return to the launchpad, where it was to be caught by giant mechanical arms, called “chopsticks,” attached to the launch tower — a remarkable feat first attempted and achieved on Starship’s fifth test flight on Oct. 13.

It wasn’t clear why the booster wasn’t able to return to the launch tower, but SpaceX said factors include the safety of the launch team, the pad and the public.

The test concluded a little over an hour later after Starship fired up its engines again and completed a controlled ocean landing more than 3,000 miles away off the northwest coast of Australia. During its flight, the spacecraft fired its engines in space, a key goal of the test since Starship will need to do that in order to reach the moon.

The Starship launch system is the biggest and most powerful ever built, with more thrust than the giant Saturn V that propelled the Apollo astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has a $4-billion contract to develop a “lunar lander” version of the Starship spacecraft that can return astronauts to the moon as part of its Artemis III mission scheduled for September 2026.

However, Musk developed the rocket system to take astronauts to Mars, something he would like to accomplish during his lifetime. Trump has expressed interest in such an endeavor, wondering why the space agency has been focused on the moon.

“I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground. Good luck to Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!” the president-elect posted Tuesday on the conservative social media network Truth Social before the test flight.

Musk has transformed the space business by creating reusable booster rockets that cut costs, such as the company’s workhorse Falcon 9, which sends satellites into space. Reusing the Super Heavy booster dramatically cuts costs, with each booster powered by 33 engines fueled by methane. The reusable upper Starship spacecraft is powered by six engines.

Musk, who splits time also managing Tesla and his other companies, was appointed by Trump last week to lead a Department of Government Efficiency agency with former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. However, many details remain to be worked out — the department doesn’t even exist yet.

In a tweet he posted shortly before the election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took arms against the Food and Drug Administration and its scientists.

“The FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote, decrying the agency’s “aggressive suppression” of such worthless anti-COVID nostrums as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

“If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you,” he continued: “1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as his secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees key public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, would give Kennedy the power to turn his threat into reality.

That has sent a chill through the scientific community. Serious scientists are understandably dismayed about the damage that Kennedy and Trump could do to the nation’s public health infrastructure — indeed, to public health itself.

“Scientists are facing a huge threat and need to respond, if not for their own well-being, but for public health in general,” says Robert Morris, an epidemiologist and former professor of community health at Tufts medical school. “Academic scientists need to stand together, or they’ll be picked off individually and science will suffer.”

Kennedy is an overt anti-vaccination agitator, among his many other pet pseudoscientific positions. He has called the COVID vaccines, which have saved millions of lives worldwide, “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

He has pushed the long-discredited claim that the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine causes autism. A 2005 screed alleging the link, published jointly by Rolling Stone and Salon.com, was so stuffed with falsehoods that it was retracted by both publications.

Kennedy has voiced the unmistakably antisemitic claim that the COVID virus was “ethnically targeted” by a mysterious sinister force “to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while sparing Jews. He has asserted that chemicals in the environment are turning children gay or transgender, a position he shares with the conspiracy-monger Alex Jones.

Kennedy has elevated threats to the livelihoods of scientists who have resisted his brand of balderdash from the implicit to the explicit. He has talked about firing hundreds of government-employed researchers as a method of remaking the government’s scientific establishment.

The hostility he displays toward government scientists isn’t new.

In a 2021 book titled “The Real Anthony Fauci” — described by the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski as a “conspiracy theory extravaganza,” he absurdly portrayed Fauci, one of the most respected public health officials in America, as a “powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.” Fauci’s presumed crime was advocating social distancing and mask policies in the heat of the pandemic.

Never mind that the person in charge of the government’s anti-pandemic policies at that time was Kennedy’s new patron, then-President Trump. Kennedy’s attack on Fauci got taken up by House Republicans as part of their long campaign of slander against scientists involved in COVID research.

To be sure, a few nuggets of legitimate science peek out from within the depths of Kennedy’s world view, as is often the case with conspiracists. His critique of the FDA’s “war on public health” also blamed the agency for ostensibly suppressing “clean foods, sunshine, exercise … and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

At an anti-vaccine gathering in November 2023 when he was running for president, Kennedy called on the NIH to take a “break” from studying infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and measles and to pivot to the study of such chronic conditions as diabetes and obesity.

Such a policy, however, would be based on false premises. The NIH hasn’t downplayed the importance of diabetes and obesity; one of its subsidiary institutes, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, is a key source of funding for clinical trials into diabetes treatments and for obesity research.

If Kennedy wishes to increase such funding, that’s all to the good. But to reduce or suspend funding for research into infectious diseases that can have an acute impact on public health, as though all this research is part of a zero-sum game, would be catastrophic.

Kennedy’s appointment would advance the ideology-based anti-science policies of the first Trump term, when COVID research was stymied for three years.

History provides ample evidence of the consequences of allowing ideology to govern scientific inquiry.

The best example may be the reign of Trofim Lysenko, who gained power over the entire scientific establishment of Soviet Russia beginning with Stalin’s regime and continuing under Nikita Khrushchev. Lysenko benefited from Stalin’s suspicion of and hostility toward scientific experts, whom his henchmen denigrated as “enemies of the people” for their defense of “pure science for the sake of science.”

The principle target was genetics, which the Stalinists derided as “pseudoscientific trash” and subjected to “a one-sided political battle,” as the dissident Soviet biologist Zhores Medvedev wrote in his lengthy examination of Lysenko’s career (smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. and published in the U.S. in 1969).

Lysenko’s key theories harked back to the 19th century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who held that environmentally acquired characteristics could be inherited by offspring — a theory that was exploded by the experiments of Gregor Mendel in the 1850s and 1860s.

Disastrously, the results of his dominance over Soviet science included repeated crop failures. The final estimated toll of famines under Stalin came to more than 7 million of his own citizens. In China, tens of millions more perished in a 1959-1961 famine caused in part by Mao Zedong’s embrace of Lysenko’s policies.

As Medvedev observed, those who wish to undermine science often begin by attacking individual scientists, While Lysenko occupied the highest echelon of Soviet scientific policymaking, “vulgarization, demogoguery, and slander against Soviet geneticists filled both the scientific and the popular press,” Medvedev observed.

These may be extreme examples, but the lesson here is that positioning science as the servant of ideology is perilous.

Childhood vaccination rates for the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine have been declining for years, thanks in part to anti-vaccine propaganda purveyed by Kennedy and his ilk.

In 2019, according to CDC figures, 20 states had vaccination rates of 95% or above, 23 had rates of 90% to 94.9%, and only three had rates below 90%. By the 2023-2024 school year, only 11 states were at 95% or higher, 24 were in the 90%-94.5% range, and 14 states were below 90%.

The latter group included the red states Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Idaho and Oklahoma. (In California, where state law eliminated exemptions for anything other than a documented medical condition, the rate was above 96% in both school years.)

As vaccination rates decline, outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases rise. The CDC counts 277 measles cases in the U.S. so far this year, up from only 13 cases in 2020. The World Health organization and CDC reported only a few days ago that measles cases rose last year to 10.3 million people worldwide, a 20% increase over 2022, largely due to shrinking vaccine coverage.

Even before Kennedy’s nomination, the future looked dire. During the campaign, Trump declared, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”

As was typically the case, Trump offered no further specifics, but all 50 states mandate not only MMR vaccinations, but shots against polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and chicken pox for all schoolchildren. His pledge undermined what might be considered the lone anti-pandemic victory of his tenure, the development of the very COVID vaccines that he later disparaged.

Despite the mandates, many states have taken a lax approach to exemptions, with the result that the nationwide rate for all such vaccinations declined to less than 93% in 2023-2024 from 95% in 2019. That’s alarming, because 95% is generally considered the minimum to produce “herd immunity,” in which vaccination is so widespread that even the unvaccinated are protected from the spread of these diseases.

If the hostility displayed by Kennedy and Trump toward vaccination mandates becomes federal policy, we may well see more and larger outbreaks.

The outlines of a response by the scientific community — including organized opposition to Kennedy’s appointment — are only now developing. Morris has proposed the establishment of a “Science Public Information Network” as a public counterweight to scientific disinformation.

As Medvedev documented, the precondition for destroying public confidence in science is to demean and demonize scientists — as “enemies of the people,” as saboteurs and grifters. Kennedy and Trump have gone down that road.

In a town hall last year sponsored by News Nation, Kennedy complained that “experts” often end up on opposite sides of a debate, which he took as an indication that they shouldn’t be believed.

“Trusting the experts is a function of religion and totalitarianism,” he said. “It is not a function of democracy. In democracy, we question everything.”

Yet our understanding of the science of disease and vaccination isn’t a product of “experts” simply winging it; it’s the product of years of empirical data, all available publicly.

Is the scientific establishment up to the task? Morris isn’t sure. “Most of the people I know are actively deciding whether to go the ramparts or go to the bunker.”

Dozens of tenants at an affordable housing complex for arts and entertainment workers are in rebellion amid a dispute over a rent increase and other alleged issues at the Hollywood property.

A group of residents at the Hollywood Arts Collective released a statement Thursday accusing Thomas Safran & Associates, the property management company, and the Entertainment Community Fund, which helped develop the project, of luring them into signing leases under false pretenses.

“After just one year of existence, tenants have been advised by property management, Thomas Safran & Associates (TSA), that their rent WILL BE increased every year,” the resident group said in a press release.

“This is in spite of multiple false verbal promises made to prospective tenants during the application process that rent would not be raised, or if it were to be, that the raises would be minimal, at 2-3%. … The struggle to pursue a dream in Hollywood led many of the tenants to a living nightmare.”

The management company denies misleading tenants and contends that the terms of residency, including potential rent increases, were clearly outlined in the contracts that they signed. Jordan Pynes, president of TSA, called the tenant uprising “very disheartening” in a statement.

“We are saddened and disappointed that some residents of the Hollywood Arts Collective are unhappy with the property,” Pynes said.

“TSA is committed to providing exceptional affordable housing to residents in Hollywood and around Southern California, and the assertion that we did not properly disclose how the affordable Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program works for this project is simply not true.”

Keith McNutt, executive director of the Entertainment Community Fund’s Western Region, said in a statement that the nonprofit organization “remains dedicated to supporting the performing arts and entertainment community at The Cicely Tyson Residential Building (part of The Hollywood Arts Collective)” in collaboration with the property manager.

This type of quarrel is common at Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties, according to Anya Lawler, a legislative advocate for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.

“The way that rents are set in LIHTC properties does not guarantee that tenants’ rent will stay affordable over time, and tenants are often unaware of that,” Lawler said.

“It can be really jarring to find out that they’re living in an affordable property, and their rent … can continue to go up in ways that they can’t afford. And it’s a real problem. The whole system is in need of rethinking and reform.”

Billed as a haven for struggling artists, the complex began housing residents in April 2023. The 10-story building on Schrader Boulevard boasts 151 units.

Applicants had to prove they work in a creative field and make 80% or less of the area median income. Rent prices were set between 30% and 50% of tenants’ monthly income at move-in.

After TSA notified residents in August of an impending 7% rent increase, nearly 40 tenants emailed letters protesting the rent spike and airing grievances, including malfunctioning fire alarms and elevator breakdowns.

“As a working low-income artist, this news is financially devastating, and represents a break of confidence in the mission that the Hollywood Arts Collective claims to represent,” the letters read.

Elena Theisner, vice president of property management at TSA, responded to residents’ concerns by scheduling a community meeting. She cited rising operational costs as the primary reason for the rent increase in an email to tenants.

Following the meeting, Theisner told The Times on Sept. 25 that TSA had reached a compromise with residents by agreeing to lower the rent increase to 4%, schedule an informational session and hold quarterly meetings with tenants.

Some residents, however, were not satisfied.

On Oct. 30, the newly formed Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn. emailed TSA and the Entertainment Community Fund a list of demands, including providing new accommodations for residents with disabilities, covering the cost of utilities, enhancing building security and abolishing the rent increase altogether.

Julia Mata, a resident and organizer at the Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn., told The Times that 39 residents signed the demand letter.

On Nov. 5, the building managers provided written responses to each of the association’s demands. They stuck to the 4% rent increase, explaining that the collective is not rent controlled or project-based Section 8 housing, which keeps tenants’ rent payments capped at roughly 30% of their income.

“This is not unique to this building — annual rent increases are normal and to be expected at Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects,” the response from management read.

The building managers also declined to cover residents’ utility costs beyond existing discounts or provide additional security measures. They were more amenable when it came to disability accommodations and community amenities — granting some and agreeing to consider others.

Central to the conflict are various artist-friendly facilities — such as a recording studio, galleries and a theater — that residents say were never provided or were falsely advertised as perks.

McNutt said in a statement that a number of services will be available to Hollywood Arts Collective residents starting in 2025. Those services will include career and financial wellness workshops.

McNutt added that the fund is working with the city to begin construction on the Rita Moreno Arts Building — a structure next to the apartment complex with a 71-seat theater to be rented for rehearsals, performances, film screenings and other purposes.

Targeted for completion in 2026, the arts building is not intended to be “a direct amenity solely for residential tenants” — though residents may be permitted to use the theater when it isn’t being loaned out, according to a document provided to The Times.

“This has been a much more lengthy process than anticipated,” McNutt said in a statement, “but will deliver more wonderful amenities for the local community in Hollywood, including a beautiful new theater, two gallery spaces for non-profit arts partners and our new training center.”

The building management team is scheduled to meet with disabled tenants Tuesday evening to review their requests, which included accommodations for individual units and more accessible parking spots. The Hollywood Arts Collective Tenants Assn. is expected to hold a news conference Wednesday.