Bob and Doug... if you're Canadian, you get this.
Launch was cool, though I don't think "historic" like the media campaign was touting.
Really don't like how corporate and branded everything was, but I guess that's the wave of the future, all hail our corporate overlords.
I think you're missing what makes it 'historical'.
The corporate aspect is the historic part... no company has done this before.
Up until now, man-rated rockets were the exclusive property of governments and paramilitary government establishments. (NASA largely drew on Military personnel for Astronauts and most of their manned work in the sixties and seventies, during the height of the agency's popularity, prestige, and the bulk of the important records, were done as part of Defense Department research. Without Gemini and Apollo, the MX 'Peacekeeper' MIRV wouldn't have been possible. The main reason the Shuttle had cross-wind glide capability was an Air Force requirement, and so on.)
in other words,
Governments had put people in orbit using what amounts to
military gear with a thin coat of civilian respectability.
SpaceX is a
private company and their capsule was their own proposal, engineered in-house, and won the contract in competitive bidding against several major corporations (Boeing, Lockheed, General Dyamics, and so on)...and it worked. works. is working. Lofted on a booster also built with private money to private industry specs by a private company instead of a government agency using unlimited taxpayer funding to brute-force solutions.
built by the same process as Space Shuttle, this would still be on the drawing board and we would still be sending our astronauts to Uzbekistan to hitch rides with the russians.
