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2016: The Year of Space
2016 is shaping up to be the most interesting year for space flight since the days of Apollo, especially if you book-end it with the tale end of 2015.
 | Dec 2015 |
|  | First successful Falcon 9 landing (on land) |
| | First flight of Falcon 9 v 1.2 |
| | Return to flight after June mishap |
| April 2016: First successful barge landing |
| April 2016: SpaceX announces plans for 2018 landing of 5 tonnes on Mars (huge surprise) |
| July/August/Sept: First re-flight of Falcon 9 booster |
| August: SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition |
| September: Reveal of Mars plans |
| Nov/Dec/Jan: First flight of Falcon Heavy |
| On top of all of that: Up to 18 flights and landing attempts of Falcon 9 |
| Blue Origin's first re-flight of their rocket (and in late 2015, the first landing) |
(Also of recent was the reveal of Pluto)
The above represents a lot of very momentous events, all packed into little more than a year. If you're someone intrigued by spaceflight, it's perhaps analogous to the year a sports nutt's favorite hockey team won the Stanley Cup and set all sorts of records.
It could all come to a grinding half if and when the next rocket blows up, but if all goes according to plan, it will be a crazy year.
Widening the scope technology wise, we've also recently had:
| Sept 2015: Autopilot beta goes live -- first compelling semi-autonomous technology on the market |
| Sept 2015: Release/reveal of Tesla Model X |
| March 2016: Reveal of Tesla Model 3, with 400,000 reservations |
| Gigafactory phase 1 starting to come on line |
| Volvo's announcement of 2017 program that will feature real families driving fully autonomous vehicles on select roads |
| AlphaGo beats world "Go" champion |
| Deep Learning making big strides |
| Gravitational waves |
There's a lot happening...
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