> It's a step, but not a first step - it's the second step along the nations/large/medium/small/people road
Cool! I agree, but did anyone claim it was the first step?
Magellan or Captain Cook weren't the first steps of their day, either. Nor were the Apollo missions first steps. The Mercury missions had come first!
Why can't we be exciting, and have that feeling of exploration for each step? Why should only the first step be exciting? I reject the notion and would argue that every step in pushing our boundaries further out is exciting.
> The first stage landing is great, but again it's not new -- SpaceX have been doing this for a few years now
I feel like you and I have different time-horizons for what counts as "the dawn of a new space age". When areoform said we were at that dawn I didn't take it to mean on this day we are at that dawn.
The dawn of a new age takes a while. This decade is the dawn of a new space age, not necessarily this specific day. At least, that's how I interpreted the comments.
> Cool! I agree, but did anyone claim it was the first step?
Yes, the person I responded to said
"This is a huge first step on the ladder."
This is a tiny step. Come summer when there's actual people on board then yes, it's a significant step towards forward movement, having being going pretty much nowhere since the 70s.
I think the biggest step recently, beyond landings or space flight or even a lunar return mission, is the live streaming of launches on youtube. SpaceX feels more futuristic and accessible because they drive that engagement, something not seen since the days of Challenger in 86.
I disagree about the dawn. The dawn of the space age was October 4th 1957.
Ha! Fair enough! The person you responded to was me, and I did write that.
I guess "first step" was not actually an important part of my claim, so I didn't think about it as I was writing it.
I'd agree that I should have written "this is a huge next step on the ladder", and not claimed it as the first step.
> This is a tiny step. Come summer when there's actual people on board then yes, it's a significant step towards forward movement, having being going pretty much nowhere since the 70s.
Eh, I think of the launch today, the in-flight abort, and DM-2 as all part of the same step. Fair enough if you don't consider it "done" until DM-2. I probably won't consider the step "done" for a couple of years (when commercial crew is as routinized as commercial cargo and booster re-use), but I would definitely consider today a major milestone.
It's the first operational flight of the hardware!
> The dawn of the space age was October 4th 1957.
Sure, that's true. I mean, it's pretty semantic at this point, but areoform had originally written: "We're at the dawn of a new space age."
I was using that as my reference for being at dawn. I think it's pretty reasonable to say we're right at the cusp of an exciting decade of development in space, in a way that we haven't been for half a century.
Cool! I agree, but did anyone claim it was the first step?
Magellan or Captain Cook weren't the first steps of their day, either. Nor were the Apollo missions first steps. The Mercury missions had come first!
Why can't we be exciting, and have that feeling of exploration for each step? Why should only the first step be exciting? I reject the notion and would argue that every step in pushing our boundaries further out is exciting.
> The first stage landing is great, but again it's not new -- SpaceX have been doing this for a few years now
I feel like you and I have different time-horizons for what counts as "the dawn of a new space age". When areoform said we were at that dawn I didn't take it to mean on this day we are at that dawn.
The dawn of a new age takes a while. This decade is the dawn of a new space age, not necessarily this specific day. At least, that's how I interpreted the comments.