This is a great time to be alive

These, brothers and sisters, are great days.

I'm watching, live, on satellite TV, a Russian space ship automatically dock with a space station. A passenger - an Iranian immigrant who didn't even speak English when she came to his country at the tender age of 16, paid her way to get there. Another space ship just left that station and is coming back home. Robot probes are flying hither and yon across the solar system, plans are afoot to return to the moon and establish a genuine presence, not a few years ago a private company launched their own sub-orbital craft, a British billionaire is building his own fleet to fly tourists to space ..

And yes, novel launch systems are in the offing.

I watch all of this and I at least can't help but feel that these are the best days of all to be alive. If we're lucky these are the beginnings of great things for our species.

At any rate, that's how I felt watching Anousheh Ansari and her shipmates dock with ISS.