Elon Musk doesn't seem like the easiest person to work with, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a more accomplished human.
I mean, I guess some people here subscribe to the notion that space travel is imperative for human survival. In that case, you might argue that each step towards it is more valuable than anything else that does not immediately push towards human space travel. Human space travel will save humanity, your piddly vaccine only saves a couple of hundred million people. But that seems a bizarre argument to make (and maybe that's why one really makes it).
Edit: -3 in one hour? Wow. For what it's worth, I made this comment in good faith.
I think a great deal of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that it's a private company doing this, and not a government. Well, I'm most emphatically not enthusiastic about that. In fact, it smells rather dystopian. Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no. I don't want space exploration to be led by a private company, and certainly not by a small group of insanely rich individuals. As much as I admire Elon Musk - and Jeff Bezos, and all the others trying to get us back into space - these people are not the ones who ought to be leading us.
Part of my discomfort with this course of events is no doubt just my personal political views - I'm about as far left as you can go. But what's happening also reminds me of some of Heinlein's stories - when space exploration was fueled by money, human rights (especially the collective right of self determination) fell by the wayside.
If the cost of going to space is the permanent privatization of exploration, I can't be enthusiastic about it.
Can they really? I personally disagree. I believe that it is always the nature of governments to grow larger, more evil, more bureaucratic and more corrupt, until they are - by necessity - overthrown and replaced by the next iteration.
As for your disdain of corporations... I'll remind you that corporations are an artificial legal fiction that depend on the State for their very existence. They are however, arguably more accountable to the populace at large, who can vote with their dollars when it comes to interacting with said corporations. Governments, on the other hand, hold for themselves a monopoly on the "legal" use of force, and are ultimately not accountable at all. Witness the governments that have suspended elections, imposed "marshal law" or otherwise pre-empted the democratic process in the name of some "emergency" or other. Reichstag fire, anybody?
Anyway, to keep this remotely on topic, I'll say that the fact that a private entity accomplished this feat is very significant exactly because it represents a step towards the democratization of space travel. No longer will the State be in the position of determining who can and can't go into space, and picking a handful of elites to send up. Now, space travel is cheap enough that it no longer requires the trappings of the State... we're one step closer to space tourism, to a day when travelling into space is accessible to a large percentage of the population, and to a day when we decide who goes into space, as opposed to a few bureaucrats deciding. That is a big-deal as far as I'm concerned.
Disclaimer: I'm about as libertarian / voluntaryist / anarcho-capitalist as you can get.
> I'll say that the fact that a private entity accomplished this feat is very significant exactly because it represents a step towards the democratization of space travel.
Buzzword alert! I catch your gist, though. SpaceX's accomplishments bring us closer to the idea of people being able to go to space "just cuz" - the ability to buy a ticket. Ok, agreed. But I'll still content that the enthusiasm displayed here and on reddit is far out of proportion. Even within the small arena of private, LEO spaceflight, this isn't the moment I would pick as the important one. SpaceX's first launch, maybe. Or the first commercial cargo in space. Or the first commercial human in space (yet to happen, I think?). But this? It doesn't make sense to me.