Yeah, it’s not a job for people who want work/life balance. I think that’s why a lot of people leave after a few years. It’s a burn bright, burn short kind of thing. The kind of thing I would have loved to do in my mid-twenties.
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I for one, look forward to living in his libertarian paradise on Mars. Working twenty hours a day for the only employer who controls my oxygen supply.
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Sounds like a good movie plot.
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But at least you can escape to…Nope….live in the woods? His workers are so screwed.
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I can see the benefits of taxpayer funded government contracts now.
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But only for libertarians.
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When they told him that he wouldn’t get astronaut pins, did he go ballistic?
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Bezos when he was told he wouldn’t get FAA astronaut wings:
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This. If you watch a real launch you will notice that very quickly – basically as soon as the atmosphere is not too thick – it turns sideways because you mostly need to go fast around the earth. A sub-orbital flight that went as high as the ISS would still be a long way from orbit.
Also while I know he plans to do so Elon Musk hasn’t actually flown on any of the SpaceX rockets. Instead their rockets are already useful they send astronauts to the ISS and launch communications satellites. Honestly I wouldn’t even begrudge him if he did a joy ride launch like this given that they have already delivered actual launch vehicles.
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SpaceX already put a Tesla Roadster in a Mars-intersecting orbit. That’s further than the Moon by a significant margin. I’m no fan of Musk, but at least SpaceX is doing useful things with their technology (putting cars into orbit notwithstanding).
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Putting junk into space is “useful”?
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Hence the notwithstanding. I mean the ISS supply runs. Having multiple delivery vehicles to supply the ISS is important, as there is a risk of there being none if something grounds the Russian vehicles.
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If you want to demonstrate your rocket works before you put multi billion dollar research probe on it, yes it is useful.
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And landing the booster so that it can be reused actually IS innovative and useful. With both growth potential and applicability to other missions. Compare that to spaceship one, which was more of an exercise in designing the craft to pretty much a dead end.
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Now that we have this out of the way, hopefully there won’t be any others.
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We’re moving further away from actually having a space program that includes all of humanity by allowing corporations to take over. It’s a huge mistake, if you ask me… 
There are other ways to do it.
There always are more, sadly.
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I mean yeah it’s cool that there’s a renewed interest in space travel after NASA was gutted but it just feels so hollow to me. It’s no longer about advancing humankind - it’s now just about some billionaires playing out their childhood fantasies and making money. Elon Musk’s entire Mars fantasy is at its core only about setting up his own Ayn Rand theme park FFS.
Its hard for me to feel much excitement about SpaceX successfully docking with ISS when Russian Soyuz capsules designed in the 1960s with paper and slide rules have been doing this successfully for some two decades now. But I guess the SpaceX capsule has touch screens so we are expected to be impressed.
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This is such a salient point. To me this competition really finishes off a lifelong interest in space travel, because it really hammers in that actually, it is never going to be for anyone like you. I will still be interested in the robot probes because there’s a fascinating universe to discover out there. But this so plainly has nothing to do with that.
Congratulations to Musk for at least getting higher than Sputnik I in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961, I suppose. I have no idea why we should pay so much attention to the others who didn’t even accomplish that, outside of People or TMZ or other things that keep track of celebrity antics.
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