The first privately funded space vehicle launched into space and safely landed back on Earth this morning. This could, some day, be seen as being as important as the Moon Landing to the future of humanity in space. If the government continues to allow private groups to launch their own space vehicles, eventually corporations will start mining asteroids, putting humans at work in space, and leading the way to a real colonization. It's not happening if we leave it to governments to do the job. Like most innovations it has to come from those with a profit motive, or it's going to take forever.

I really can't stress enough the importance of this. NASA, as basically the only entity in the US that was going in to space, consider many ideas for vehicles, and in the end, decides upon one version to try out. They can't afford to actually build different vehicles to see which one works best. Events like the X-Prize, however, give incentive to private entities to build their own vehicles and send them in to space. Even if none of them work, the ideas tried out will be either successes or failures, giving a lot more real feedback on vehicles than we've gotten from NASA in the last 30 years.