I used to regret coming into this world mere months after the final Apollo mission, thinking I had missed the great age of exploration. But I no longer do. In just the last six months, I have seen the launch of the two most powerful rockets ever built, the Space Launch System and Starship. I have seen the naming of not one but two crews that will fly around the Moon, Artemis II and the dearMoon project. As NASA says, we are going.

Yet still more remarkably, during the last half-year, I have seen two dozen rockets land on a drone ship and fly again. We no longer treat this as remarkable, but we absolutely should. These now-routine Falcon 9 first stage landings at sea are a harbinger of the future. //

This is a far more wonderful and wild time in space than any that came before. There is incredible opportunity and peril. The future is unknowable but tantalizing.

So I no longer have any regrets about missing Apollo. I am thrilled to be alive at this very moment in human history. //

pokrface Senior Technology Editor

ARS STAFF

Re: the ubiquity of reusability — when I'm doing Saturn V tour shifts, one of the most common questions people ask is whether the giant Saturn V they're standing next to ever flew, and how NASA recovered it. I would guess that out of everyone who asks a question about the rocket, 50% of them ask that one in particular. When I tell them that no, the Saturn V was a one-and-done thing and most of it was destroyed during launch, most folks are genuinely flabbergasted.

SpaceX has gotten so good at reusable rocketry that it's almost unbelievable. It's similarly unbelievable how quickly the idea of rockets that return and land on their own has become nor just normalized, but the expected way things are supposed to work.

Like Berger says, that's one of the most amazing shifts in perspective I've ever seen in my entire life.