In case you don't read Samizdata regularly, (and if not, what is wrong with you?) you should know about this. A private company has built a rocket-engined reusable spaceship. They just had their first powered test flight, hitting Mach 1.2 without leaving the atmosphere.
In a follow-up post Dale Amon makes several crucial observations about the endeavor:
Those supporting the government position have said high costs are inherent in space flight. The short time scale, low costs and aggressive testing program of Scaled Composites should be an eye-opener to those nay-sayers. What I and others have been writing for nearly a quarter of a century is correct. The rocketmen are not underestimating the cost of space. It is the government and government contractors who have been "ripping the arse" out of the public purse.
Yes, who'd have thought a private company could do more interesting things than NASA and do them at a much lower cost? Oh yeah, each and every libertarian.
Posted by Walter at December 19, 2003 08:30 AMI had a fun conversation about this at Blogger Bash. The person with whom I was speaking was convinced that there was no possible profit motive or reason for private industry to make space flight reasonable--and that I was too hard on NASA in saying that it should be gutted and that it was a next-to-useless organization that had achieved almost nothing in the last two decades.
Imagine my surprise at seeing this article. Gosh.