I've been watching the private space movement for almost 20 years now -- since shortly after the Delta Clipper[1] and Clementine[2] proved to many people that l

I've been watching the private space movement for almost 20 years now -- since shortly after the Delta Clipper[1] and Clementine[2] proved to many people that low-cost innovation was genuinely possible in the fields of rocketry and space exploration. But when I went to my first Space Access conference[3] in 1996, I can't say that I found it very encouraging. The Delta Clipper and Clementine vetrans that I met were also frequently Apollo vetrans. Brilliant, passionate engineers, but almost totally devoid of financial resources, and obviously nearing the end of their careers, if not their lives. At 19 years old I was the youngest person in the room by several decades. WIRED was regularly featuring "rockets" and "space exploration" in it's monthly "TIRED" column. I began to fear that the old dream of space -- long fostered by the likes of O'Neil, Von Braun, Oberth, and Tsiolkovsky -- would die with the previous generation, and I was arriving just in time to see its last, heroic gasp. We have turned so many corners since then. The actual rockets are merely the most tangible results of that. What I find even more hopeful is the cultural change. Politicians as disparate as Barack Obama and Dana Rohrabacher are willing to put principles ahead of pork and advocate for the development of a robust commercial space industry. It's now possible to seriously talk about "space tourism" without people sniggering derisively and making Marvin the Martian jokes. Investors are no longer cowed by that old saw about how the best way to make a small fortune in space is to start with a large fortune. Some of the largest companies on earth are investing in asteroid mining, for goodness' sake. And most critically, young people are getting truly excited and passionate about this. (It's also extremely gratifying to see women staking out a place in the industry; the old Apollo fraternity was exclusively male.) All in all, I have to say that the progress I've seen in the last two decades of space development is one of the things which most gives me hope for the future. And this is only the beginning. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) [3] http://www.space-access.org/ http://www.space-access.org/