Puppy-blender in USA Today
Though the news is filled with stories of riots and a pandemic, the most transformative things going on at present are in a totally different sphere. One of those things is pretty obvious, the other less so.
The obvious transformation involves SpaceX’s successful launch of a human crew into orbit, the first such launch involving an American spacecraft in nearly a decade, and the first such launch ever by a commercial spacecraft.
D. D. Harriman to the white courtesy phone
This is huge, but in a sense, nothing new: We were launching people into orbit over 50 years ago, after all. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is bigger and fancier than a Gemini, but the mission profile is not all that different. And of course, our last mission to orbit, on board a space shuttle, was basically old hat itself.
But SpaceX is doing it for much less, and that’s revolutionary. To get a kilogram into orbit on the space shuttle costs $54,500. To do the same thing with SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon 9, costs $2,720. That’s basically a twenty-fold reduction in cost.
Lots of things that are too expensive to do at $54,500 become doable at $2,720. And SpaceX isn’t standing still. Its Starship reusable rocket, under development now, is to cost a mere $2 million per launch, and Elon Musk says its cost per kilogram to orbit will be at least 10 times lower than the Falcon 9. There are a lot more things that become doable at $272 per kilogram. At those prices, things like space tourism, space hotels, lunar mines and asteroid mining become feasible.
Unless, of course, commercial space companies will be subject to affirmative action quotas. 
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