While a lot of us were distracted with other business, this happened:

SpaceX delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA on Sunday, following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking in yet another first for Elon Musk’s company.

[…]

It was the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft carried astronauts to the orbiting lab in its nearly 20 years. NASA considers this the opening volley in a business revolution encircling Earth and eventually stretching to the moon and Mars.

So there’s at least a little good news.

There wasn’t much excitement over it, what with everything else that’s going on. And because a lot of us were distracted, there wasn’t too much complaining about the launch besides a couple of low-key and reflexive “Elon bad” responses.

It isn’t a big and flashy thing like a moon landing or the rollout of the Space Shuttles. It’s just another crack in the governmental monopoly on space, which (slightly) increases the chance that the space industry will someday benefit ordinary people.