You know we landed on the moon, right? I mean, this is cool, but from a sheer "fascinating achievement" standpoint, this is at least a few notches behind that.
You know we landed on the moon, right? I mean, this is cool, but from a sheer "fascinating achievement" standpoint, this is at least a few notches behind that.
The first is a historic series of one-shots that really can't be repeated for any sane economic purpose. The second is an attempt to automate and ruggedize it.
It's sort of why the sky-crane landing on Mars was such a historic achievement, arguably far more complex than the Apollo work. Don't let that diminish the greatness of Apollo, though. Today we have tools bording on magic, while they literally used wax pencils and slide rules. But don't let that diminish the accomplishment here, where the tools are being properly leveraged to make LEO an everyday occurrence.
In short: there's plenty of awesome to go around!
Humans are pretty crafty, but it takes a special kind of craftiness to program a computer to do it as well as a person. :)