> THAT is transformative. We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of e

> THAT is transformative. We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are. From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot. Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now. Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled. In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.