Manned spaceflight is daft. It's utterly pointless, monstrously expensive, and has a very poor safety record.
We went through the same evolution in the offshore oil business. In the 1970s we had divers ("pond life") on every rig and on a large number of DSVs. Then we had primitive ROVs which were little more than a camera on a wire ("soap on a rope"). Then we had seriously capable work class ROVs, but we continued to use pond life.
Nowadays all new subsea installations are ROV-friendly and are designed for diverless intervention. Divers are rare nowadays. Obsolete.
Same ought to be true of space. Robotic spacecraft are vastly cheaper and smaller and more capable than the ones which lug talking monkeys. The ISS is an absurdity. They are running out of highly contrived 'experiments' which are designed to be done by humans in order to 'justify' them being done by humans and not by the space equivalent of ROVs and AUVs.
Having said all of that, I'll be watching the spectacle of a Tesla being launched this evening and I'll raise a glass of Mac30 to the health and success of the two passengers.
Nobody does the hoopla and showboating of such occasions better than the Septics.
I entrust my personal safety to an Elon Musk product every time I drive my car. It's the safest car type in the world by several measures. I therefore have a very high level of confidence that this vehicle will do a bloody marvelous job of carrying two passengers to that shiny thing in the night sky.
I worked on the seabed search and recovery of Challenger for USN SupSalv's civilian contractor. I've held pieces of the damned thing in my hands. It was a piece of junk. Utter garbage. It was designed for a particular task and was built to need talking monkeys to operate it. It's predecessor, Buran, did not need talking monkeys and was 100% safe and 100% successful in its limited mission.
Life may not be the party you hoped for, but while you're here, you may as well dance. 
