You'd never know by this blog so far, but I'm a huge space nerd. I co-organize the Toronto Space Club, which grew out of my Venus Labs project. I follow all the awesome "new space" stuff very closely.  Anyway, all of this is just lead up to: I'm VERY excited for tomorrow's SpaceX Crew Dragon "Demo 2" Launch. Of course, NASA and SpaceX will be streaming it, and I'll be watching. Launch at 4:33:33pm EDT (exactly, they need this precision to rendezvous with the ISS), but I'll be tuning in starting at noon to catch when the Astronauts actually board the vessel - full schedule.  I'll probably also be checking in with the stream at Everyday Astronaut, in addition to the official NASA streams, that guy is living his (and my) dream!

There hasn't been anything like this IN MY LIFETIME, humans boarding a new rocket to space for the first time. And IMPORTANTLY, under the new "NASA is just a commercial customer" scheme, anyone (rich enough) can book tickets to space, though obviously you'd need permission if you e.g. want to go to the ISS. I expect to see humans land on both the moon ("to stay", as Jim Bridenstine says) and Mars in this decade, i.e. before 2030. It's an exciting time to be alive; I'm hoping that humans on Mars will reset the world a bit, in the same kind of way that "pale blue dot" did.

Thanks to Elon for the image of the rocket & payload we're talking about, he posted a huge version on twitter and it's now my desktop background image.