(lance smith) wrote in
om:

The actual flying/rocketing/technology part is nothing new. What is
historic is the people/process in which it was done. Similar to the
assembly line- everyone was making guns before Eli Whitney came along,
and plenty of people were cranking out cars before Henry Ford. They
changed the world, but the technical aspects of what they did could be
considered quite minimal.

Another good analogy... The Atlantic had been crossed by many times before
Lindberg, but his flight - by an individual, in a private aircraft built on
a relative shoe string - is the one (probably the only one that folks
outside aviation circles) that is remembered.