Space Station grabs SpaceX Dragon ship

[2008] "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work." (http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa)

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.

The enthusiasm shown for this accomplishment on Hacker News is borderline ridiculous. This comment seems particularly over the top to me. What does this even mean, how do you measure the attribute of "being accomplished" on a 1d scale across vastly different kinds of accomplishment? To me it seems obvious that some of the medical accomplishments of the past 100 years are easily and vastly more important than a private space launch, but I wouldn't normally compare those things in such a manner. I had to rewrite this paragraph multiple times because it feels so bizarre. I haven't even touched on the question whether and to what degree you can ascribe an accomplishment of a group of people to an individual, which makes the whole comparison even stranger and less meaningful.

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.

SpaceX is exciting because Elon is one of us. He's a silicon valley founder who put all his personal money on the line to change the world. Paraphrasing PG, he didn't forget his dreams and he's inspiring many of us to remember our own.

SpaceX is just beginning. His launch costs are now as low as the Russians (the cheapest). The Falcon 9 heavy will cut that in half, and reusability is intended to cut it by 80% again (10x improvement is the next goal). Watch this animation to see reusability, it's awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IbxqsWLXsw

Elon has said he will consider the company to have failed if they dont get reusability to work. These cost improvements will make many things possible and change the world. And these too are just the beginning.

That video gave me the creeps: "One hundred thousand dead after engine of spacex launcher fails."

Do you have any clue about how they intend to solve this problem?

Where the hell are you getting this 100,000 people dead stuff? It's a rocket engine, not a nuclear weapon. What problem is it you're suggesting they need to solve?

I was thinking about the launcher falling on a skyscraper for example. My number was off by an order of magnitude, sorry.

The problem is: making sure the launcher lands where it has to or else falls on an unpopulated area. I expect this to be harder than with the free fall capsules, where you only have to calculate a trajectory and gravity does the rest.