Until recently, I've sense an indiscrepancy between how Elon Musk is running Spacex on a day-to-day basis, and his lofty ambitions for the commercialization of space exploration to precipitate the colonization of space. The latter only comes out in interviews. I haven't been able to connect the dots between, impressive as it is, launching rockets to supply the ISS leads to colonizing Mars.
Then I saw the footage of Spacex's rocket successfully landing on the drone ship. I think I have a greater sense of Musk's vision.
Everything Spacex has done so far, just sending rockets to the ISS? That isn't their business plan, or their business model, for the long-term. That isn't the final stage. The final stage won't be, either, just sending all manner of satellites up to space, or sending rockets up for asteroid mining, even though that too may come to pass. No, in landing a rocket on an automated drone ship, I realize Spacex is trying to not only go from 0-to-1, but then also from 1-to-n. Spacex is trying to do it all.
However many years from now, when everything they do is perfected, Spacex is going to scale, marvelously. When there are dozens of rockets taking off and landing on drone ships year after year, it's really going to expand our imagination and ambition of what can be done with ships taking off from Earth. Things that might still strike most people as too lofty a goal today, like getting so many rockets beyond the moon, or Earth's orbit, will become common-sense extensions of what Spacex does. Then, the process of expanding what human space exploration is really capable of, as a commerical, scientific, and humanistic endeavour, will be iterated, again and again, until we're landing ships on Mars.
I'm not saying all this is going to happen. I just think I finally understand think from Elon Musk's point of view.
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