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.
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
What happened today is only different because it was not government-funded[0]. I'm not allergic to the idea of government doing things (I agree with Barney Frank that "government is just the name for the things we decide to do together"), and so I really don't consider it to be interesting, or extraordinary, or insane. It's exactly what many others have done, just funded differently.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
The obvious, cliche response is "not nowadays". But, more helpfully - who has jurisdiction in space?
That is my fear. At the moment, the power with jurisdiction in space is the power that can get to space. And I want that power to be elected.
Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful. As eager as I am for humans to go further, I can't help but think that if we can't maintain that way of doing things - if humanity must, in order to get to space, give up on the hope of universal rights and self-determination (meaning democratically elected bodies of power) - then we're not ready. If we can't decide to go to space cooperatively, as one unit - if a few lucky individuals have to do it for us, even if they're right (which I believe they are), then we're not ready to go.
[0] That's a lie, of course. It was partially government-funded, because the promise of contracts with NASA et al is what's making this possible (to my understanding). But that's beyond my argument.
Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.
I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.
But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.
Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.