> Yes, the person I responded to said > "This is a huge first step on the ladder." Ha! Fair enough! The person you responded to was me, and I did write that.

> Yes, the person I responded to said > "This is a huge first step on the ladder." 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. I'm not going to stop being excited about that!