The high profile cases of recent human space travel is the Blue Horizon which generated a ton of buzz, mostly from people complaining (justly) about how out of touch these people are. I think the sentiment of human space travel extends from there. People cringe from seeing Jeff Bezos spill his champagne after landing and then if they hear about some people going to the ISS they ask: “whats the point?” I think this is a just question and a logical extensions.

Now for the excitement around SpaceX. There was also a ton of buzz around Perseverance. And think people were also quite excited—though not as much—about the Parker solar probe. For future missions I think more people are excited about getting back mars samples from Percy the rover, and about a hypothetical mission to use gravitational lensing from the Sun to photograph surfaces of exo-planets. The hype around Starship seems to me to be inflated by marketing, when talking to space nerds around me there isn’t really that much excitement about what we can achieve with a SpaceX Starship that we can’t with a regular old robotic state funded mission.