It seems so ordinary yet surreal. So second nature. Seems as if humanity has access to another realm suddenly. It probably must have felt the same when the airplanes started carrying ordinary joe blows.
First human in space was in 1961. We are some decades behind this time.
Well, launching these 4 people does take over a ~~million gallons of kerosene~~ (edit: million lbs of CO2 emissions), so for the environment it is probably good that it isn't as common as jet travel yet. It will probably take fusion energy or mass solar, plus hydrogen rockets (emit only water).
Yeah but will it be? As it stands no rocket fuel is made in a clean way. As someone who very much intends to stay on Earth for the rest of my life, I feel well within my rights to be concerned that unneeded space travel is making stuff worse for us down here. Going into orbit is environmentally expensive, and society should use this technology judiciously.
This is also assuming that there's no value in small, safe, steps on a path to socially acceptable space travel. Right now there's a perception of a lot of risk in going to space which is valid. If technology becomes safer over night no one will know it is safer. These incremental "we can launch", "we can reuse", "we can send a person", "we can send 4 people", etc messages are broadcasting to people that we can do this and that we are doing it. It's no longer science fiction.
Per Elon, yes, eventually [1].
It makes sense for them to do this too. They need the technology to be ready for mars. Positive PR is worth a lot in an industry heavily constrained by government regulations. The cost isn't likely to be that high compared to the rest of the costs involved in launching a rocket. If they're really lucky it will even help with the environmental regulators.
The Wikipedia article [2] says 38,570 US gallons of RP-1 in the first stage and 4,500 US gallons in the second.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170201135344/http://www.nmfs.n...
With Starship being methane based (higher H to C ratio) and at bigger scale hopefully it gets that number down a lot.
This lists it at 1.1 million lbs fuel+oxygen and shows it being used with Dragon (did they use this or similar?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_Full_Thrust#Block_3