[jasonadriaan]

It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment for science and humanity as a whole. The commercialization of space travel is the only way that we will ever see the stars, as no longer are we at the mercy of the fluctuating interest in space travel from the already over-extended tax payers of certain nations. This is a beautiful moment for humanity, and a damn awesome way to start the weekend!

[sliverstorm]

It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment

I tire of statements like this. Either you have no capacity for exaggeration, or I have grossly misunderstood and the docking is actually more momentous than the discoveries of fire, DNA, germ theory, cell theory, flight, and nuclear physics combined.

Now, if we figure out how to beat aging and live forever, that is something whose impact might be difficult to overstate.

[mossplix]

living forever would lead to our extinction ... in along run our genome would adapt and we would become sterile

[Dn_Ab]

Evolution does not work that way. Evolution does not refine beyond what is good enough, it does not refactor. Genomes do not adapt, genes which encode phenotypes that are best at getting its owners to maximize reproduction with respect to an environment are selected for.

Most importantly, if we could cure aging and necessarily cancer, then you can bet we would have the sophisticated understanding of genes, proteins and cells required to fully control our genome.

[impldefined]

Personally my view is the exact opposite. Privatizing space travel will never bring us to the stars. It will get us into orbit for very high fees but e.g. deep space exploration? Too expensive, too low likelyhood of payoff. But for the really long term survival of humanity, it's a must.

[crusso]

I'll see your exact opposite view with with my own exact opposite view.

Privatizing Space will do the same thing for it that privatizing the Internet did for all of us. It will take a government-pioneered oddity that was out of reach of the masses and explore millions of ways to make it of financial benefit to the entrepreneurs who can get there first. Like with the Internet, society will be pulled along in the vortex of the Race to Space. Space will become accessible for a price and in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade before.

The technical challenges with space travel are much greater and so the time before we reach the exponential part of the curve is further away, but when the critical mass of Space travel technology has been reached it will be like the Internet in the 1990's. The Internet had been around for 20 years and only governmental and academic types even knew anything about it. Within a few years of its commercialization, its use and uses had exploded. We went from the average joe not knowing anything about it to seeing an abundance of commercials on television for it within just a couple of years.

I mention the Internet, but the pattern is one that you can see in the adoption of transatlantic sailing, rail travel, electricity, automobiles, etc. Space travel will be no different.

[learc83]

SpaceX is going to drastically reduce the price to orbit, which will drastically reduce the cost of all space exploration.

Substantially cheaper price to orbit will allow us to start doing things like economically assembling large spacecraft in space.

A cheaper method to orbit is a necessary building block of everything else, and so far NASA hasn't been able to do that. Congress views NASA as a giant jobs program, and as long as they are running NASA, cheap isn't realistic.

[morsch]

I just don't think one order of magnitude in cost-to-orbit is what is stopping us from doing things like assembling a large craft in space.

A cheaper method to orbit is in fact not a necessary building block. It's nice to have, of course. I'm sure we'll end up with more useful stuff in orbit, which is a good thing. But space exploration has so many building blocks still simply missing, this won't change anything fundamentally.

[ippisl]

Peter diamandis new company is aimed at mining asteroids. One of the ideas of how to do this is to build an engine that will move asteroids or large parts of asteroids to orbit. This kind of engine, if developed, seems very useful for space colonization.

Getting investment for such a company probably wouldn't have been possible without a private space industry.