A giant leap for backyard rocketeers

At a time when America and the world are absorbed with grim news of terrorist attacks, hostages, and war, the flight provided a welcome moment of hopeful news for humanity - and made Melvill a hero of sorts. "I'm just a guy, an old guy" he insisted after the flight. "I think I'll back off a little bit and ride my bike."

The queue to be next has already started forming. Some 27 organizations are competing for the X Prize, and at least one other company - a Canadian venture that foresees launching a rocket from a balloon - is not too far behind Rutan. Other X Prize companies say they will continue to develop their technologies even if Rutan wins. What's more, Monday's flight could be a kick to the flywheel of further innovation.

"People don't believe something until they see it," says Edward Hudgins, author of "Space: The Free Market Frontier." "If Rutan wins the X Prize, we will see the private sector leading the way into space, not the public sector."

Already, the private sector in America spends more on space ventures than the government, sending up satellites at a cost of roughly $100 billion a year. But SpaceShipOne is the first hint of expanding that market to the world of space hotels on orbiting colonies, imagined since the turn of the century.

Indeed, the hope of getting people and equipment into space on rockets that can do the job cheaply, safely, and frequently has become something of a crusade among the world's tech intelligentsia. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen bankrolled SpaceShipOne with $20 million of his own money. The creator of the popular video game Doom runs a company that is competing for the X Prize. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has started a firm that is reportedly designing a spacecraft for space tourism.

"The one thing we know is that the cost will drop and this will balloon out, and that's a fantastic achievement," says Kevin Marvel of the American Astronautical Society in Springfield, Va. "Getting the cost down is a good thing."

The $20 million SpaceShipOne program cost only about 5 percent as much as a single shuttle mission. And while much more work remains before private entrepreneurs can reach orbit - where the greatest business opportunities are - Monday's flight was an indispensable step.

Like the barnstormers who crossed America in the early years of the 20th century, promising a future when any person could get on a plane and fly across the country, today's space entrepreneurs speak about space with a sense of manifest destiny. Now, more people might listen.

"The public perception of space is that space is a government policy," says Mr. Hudgins. "But just as private entrepreneurs commercialized the Internet and the automobile, so it is private entrepreneurs that can open space and make us a potential space-faring race."

• Staff writer Elizabeth Armstrong contributed to this report, and material from Reuters was used.

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