system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The SpaceX launch is neat, but the headlines are totally overblown

When I see headlines declaring "A New Age In Space Exploration Has Begun", it's hard not to laugh. Nothing new has been achieved here other than that a private company has now done what several space agencies from multiple countries have already done. 

I think people need a reality check when we talk about going to Mars. Getting to the ISS is hard enough as it is, and that thing is barely outside our atmosphere, (about 250ish miles). Mars is 128 million miles at perihelion with an optimal launch window that only occurs once every two years. 

Maybe it can be done with decades of improvement in propulsion systems and other needed technologies, but we are a LONG way off. I'm no astrophysicist, you hardly need to be one to tell this whole SpaceX launch was way oversold.
gpt
Aerospace Engineer here. The greatest hurdle humanity has to landing a man on mars is not technical, but financial. Landing on mars would not be that much more difficult than landing on the moon, which we were able to do back in the 60's. We have been sending probes and landers to Mars for decades. Living on Mars would not be that much harder than living in LEO, which we have done continuously for the last 20 years. We lost the ability to land on the moon not because it had gotten harder, but because the public and politicians lost interest in space exploration and did not want to pay for more lunar missions. NASA has proposed many missions to return to the moon or to go to mars, but they all either failed to get funded, or were de-funded partway through.

The reason this is a new age in space exploration is because the public is finally excited about space exploration again. If NASA and Spacex can capitalize on the wave of excitement and get the funding they need, there is nothing stopping us from getting to Mars and beyond.

As far as why we would want to colonize space, space travel is one of the greatest investments we can make. For every dollar spent on the space program, 4-5 dollars are generated in the economy. This is better than almost any other program. An example of this is the transistor. The transistor was developed because the old vacuum tubes of the day were to bulky for a computer able to fit inside the Apollo capsule. In order to get around this limitation, NASA engineers made the first transistor, which allowed for the miniaturization of modern computers. The cost to the taxpayers for this innovation was the same as one bottle of coke per person.