> it achieves nothing new and exciting

I thought this but have since changed my mind. On board, real humans tax life-support systems in a way that’s difficult to simulate. And real human astronauts garble processes and communications with ground control in ways that a nation that hasn’t done deep spaceflight in a generation could probably do with practice on.

I half agree. It is new and important.

But it's hard, at least for me personally, to get really excited about it...