not long ago Musk's Mars plans were seen as unrealistic by many and now they are started appearing to be possible...looking at the breakneck speed of development at Boca Chica..you right my friend, Mars is not far off. :-)

I'm reminded of the 4-minute mile. All it takes for something once thought technically impossible to be achieved repeatedly, is for someone to do it once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

This is such a great example of human psychology and our ability to adapt to new paradigms. The amazing thing about the four minute mile, is once someone broke the previously thought impossible barrier, we had high school kids routinely running four minute miles within a few years.

I think it also says something about how hard it is to truly do something unique and break new trail. But, it opens things up for the rest of humanity. It takes a special person.

And then in America, a drought of high schoolers running 4 minute miles for what seemed to be two decades.

Whoa, it was actually over 30 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_high_school_s...

In other news, Starman is at his orbit's apogee now (past Mars). https://www.whereisroadster.com

Do we have a video link? Never actually seen proper video streamed at interplanetary distances (only photos). Maybe that's another thing SpaceX could try to solve: an interplanetary inter-network protocol. TCP/IP is not going to work because of the minute-range latencies and the heavy packet losses.

No data link.

There is an “interplanetary Internet”, look into it.

>The claim that a four-minute mile was once thought to be impossible by "informed" observers was and is a widely propagated myth created by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile (1955).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bannister#Sub-4-minute_m...

I'm still blown away by reusable rockets. If you had asked anyone involved in rockets (possibly even Musk himself) 20 years ago if we would be landing rockets today, I doubt you'd get a single "yes." That's just not where the industry looked headed and unlike anything up until today.

We had the space shuttle 20 years ago.

Which is what made it seem impossible.

Only 160,206,027 km, according to https://theskylive.com/mars-info

And only 54.6 million kilometers at the closest approach! You can actually get to Mars in way less than 9 months if you don't mind crashing into the surface at a bajillion km/sec.

Why do you say that? It's a much harder challenge.