> Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison

We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.

The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment

Our species is pretty young, around ~2 million years old, give or take a few million / hundred thousand years depending on whom you're talking to.

We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.

We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.

Personally, I'm impressed with just how unimpressed I am. Or rather, rocket launches feel like they really are becoming more and more commoditized. To the point that routine trips to the moon doesn't feel like a crazy future.

The contrast in my opinion comes more from the fact that 50 years prior to the space age people rode horses as a standard mean of transportation (more or less). It’s underwhelming to not see the line going from horse to rocket continue on the same path 50 years later.

We went to the moon in the late 60s as a massively expensive cold-war propaganda campaign, after the Soviet Union humiliating America for years when it came to firsts in space. It was a question of honor and showing that capitalism is better than communism.

Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two