Elon Musk Lives the Dream of Delos D. Harriman in Bringing Commercial Spaceflight to Life

The most recent achievement by SpaceX was a splashdown in the Pacific this morning of a cargo craft returning a ton and a half of experimental information and results back from the International Space Station.  (NASA:  SpaceX Dragon Splashes Down with Crucial NASA Research Samples)

​SpaceX's Dragon cargo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:47 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 26, southwest of Baja California with more than 3,000 pounds of NASA cargo, science and technology demonstration samples from the International Space Station.

- NASA

SpaceX cargo spacecraft leaves the dock at the ISS

Moreover, this mission accomplished,

When it arrived at the station July 20, Dragon delivered the first of two international docking adapters (IDAs) in its external cargo hold, or “trunk.” The IDAs will be used by commercial spacecraft now in development for transporting astronauts to the station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The initial adapter was installed during an Aug. 19 spacewalk by Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA. The second adapter is being built and will be delivered on a future Dragon cargo resupply mission.

- NASA

In the same mission, a SpaceX commercial spacecraft delivered the vital docking components to extended docking capability for all future commercial spacecraft and this is the fundament to the opening of space.

In this one's view, someday they will build statues of Elon Musk but a question likely much bigger to Musk than statues is whether he will get the opportunity to fly someday.  Delos D. Harriman finally did to to the Moon and it killed him but he died with such satisfaction at having made it.

That's nicely poetic but we would like to see Elon Musk return as he remains one of America's greatest and most innovative treasures.  He looks to the future even while so few other people ever do.

Longer-term, the ISS will likely not be sufficient for NASA since eventually they will need a platform to build an FTL starship (i.e. Faster than Light).  We look constantly at the publications from research scientists to see a glimmering of solutions to the many problems in pure physics which must be solved but humans don't like to be told something is impossible.  The best, such as Elon Musk, only take that as a challenge.

There are multiple, extremely high-talent scientists working on such a things but we don't see much of them since I'm sure they need the editorials from the peanuts on Twitter like the need a case of Ebola.

The real question behind any of it is whether you (i.e. anyone) will oppose Congressional chiseling of the NASA budget for no more purpose than grandstanding when it's such a miniscule expense relative to the outlay for a large variety of enormously-expensive systems (e.g. military vs social).

When the spirit of exploration dies, the spirit of Man dies with it and likely you know this or perhaps do not wish to see it but likely you know it's true anyway.  It's fundamental to almost anything we have ever done as a species except make more humans.

Some are not particularly interested in space because it's esoteric, extremely slow, and often as boring as peeling wallpaper.  So long as they understand the necessity to keep it going then that's an easy deal to make.  Fair enough if you don't want to go to space and don't care to watch so long as you understand the need.  High five if that is the case.

On Earth, the planet is divided for the most part into feudal kingdoms, some of which go back centuries, which don't seem to vary their behavior significantly from medieval times.  The flail is the weapon which is a ball on a chain with many spikes extruding from it.  That appeared to be the solution for all diplomatic problems back then and they only use bigger ones now.

The future in space from that which builds now has largely pushed forward the Spirit of Humanity rather than the typical parochial interests and China has brought some feudalism to it but that may be as much due to American truculence as a drive for simplistic Earthbound models of international relations.

Note:  none of this includes the utter bastardization and whoring of space programs by the military.  At the same time as progressive thinkers try to build the future, the military works assiduously to destroy the present.