Quote of the Week...from Elon Musk

It can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond. Don't even need gravity assist or anything.
                                                                     ---Elon Musk.

With the successful launch of Tuesday's Falcon Heavy rocket and the soft landing of two of its three booster rockets, SpaceX founder Elon Musk delivered the above reaction in a matter-of-fact manner, making me wonder whether his feet may be planted in 2018 but his mind is somehow off in the more distant future.  Musk picked as the rocket's payload his own private Tesla Roadster car, which will eventually settle into an orbit around the sun near Mars's orbit while playing endless loops (soundless in space) of David Bowie's space songs Space Oddity and Life on Mars.  Kind of reminds me of the dude in that Star Trek: First Contact movie who first develops and tests the warp drive...while loudly playing hard rock.  While the launch of Falcon Heavy marked a much-anticipated milestone within the space community, folks at large may at first have paid it passing attention but quickly put it far at the bottom of their collective priority list, below reality TV and Trump's tweets.  But that's people for you.  After all...

When you consider how different technological advances over the past couple of centuries have dramatically transformed the human condition, you'll notice that with each innovation it quickly gets adapted into society and is soon treated as if it had always existed, be it railroads, electric power, automobiles, airplanes, movies, radio & later television, computers, the internet, smart phones, etcetera.  And speaking of space travel, on only the third manned mission to the moon in 1970, television dropped live coverage for lack of viewer interest...that is, until Apollo 13 developed life-threatening problems creating a dramatic emergency ride back home.  During the next few years, if the launches generally go well as planned, we will witness another major change: people routinely traveling into space and to other worlds.  Initially it will be novel, but I predict (and will probably point back to this very blog article) that before hardly any time at all most people will treat it all as nothing much to get excited about.  That to me is one of the weirdest things about us humans...