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There are several private organisations working towards the development of non-governmental space vehicles. See this video of a TEDtalk by Burt Rutan on his efforts with SpaceShipOne. Rutan is now working with Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson to offer private sub-orbital flights. They are also going to build a space port called Spaceport America in New Mexico. Initial flights will go (maybe in 2008) from the Rutan site in the Mojave Desert in California.

Another private venture that had a test flight recently is the Blue Origin group that is funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon. There are videos of the test flight of their Goddard VTOL craft at the Blue Origin site. This is a prototype of a design called New Shepard thay want to fly sub-orbitally. Whilst it only takes off and rises a few hundred feet then lands safely, it’s a good initial flight.

I’ve been quite sceptical in the past about private space ventures. I’ve argued that it takes the resources of organisations like NASA, RFSA, ESA, JAXA, CNSA or ISRO to fund space programmes. Indeed I’ve argued that it might be better if they joined up and pooled resources.

I think I’ve changed my mind. For the big projects like Mars missions the big agencies are best placed to do them at present. But the smaller private ventures into sub-orbital space could be the start of a bootstrap process that leads to a commercialisation of space flight. This could lead to orbital and extra-orbital flights in time. If there is profit to be made then it’ll get done. It’s only a matter of time. So I now think there is room for both governmental space flight and private space flight.

I find this very exciting. Maybe one day we’ll get to a situation like that depicted in Elite where people can buy their own space craft and make a living wheeling and dealing amongst the asteroids, planets and, ultimately, the stars. For a modern port of this game get Oolite.