Again, Flight Makes Future Look Better

The idea of private space flight is like flight itself in that even people who have no interest in actually going into space can understand the fascination of others. Now that a private rocket has made it into space and back – with help from Microsoft-generated money – people are talking about what the practical uses of such flights might be in the short run. The answer most often provided is tourism. People will be able to fly into space just for the fun of flying into space, for the right price.

The Dayton area, with its many flight enthusiasts and its Air Force base surely must have a lot of people who would be eager. For others, well, let’s just say that hearing about the flights of others is excitement enough, and will continue to be for a long time.

The achievement of private space flight is unlike the achievement of flight itself in one important way: The role and visibility of naysayers has been slight. Many companies are pursuing space flight, and the aviation community has expected some to succeed for some time. It seemed a matter of time.

Government did the spadework, spending amounts of money that only government could. But the idea was never that government would dominate forever. It was a phase.

Soon, presumably, will come a phase when space travel will be largely limited not to government but to the wealthy. Burt Rutan, head of the company that made the first private space flight, says tickets at first might go for $30,000 or $50,000, but the price might come down at some stage to $12,000 or so for flights with five or six paying passengers.

Perhaps after that, as with so many technological advances, people of modest means will get to directly partake, too.

But the exciting thing here is not that some hobbyists will get to have a really neat experience. It is that barriers are being conquered, that mankind continues to progress. If being funded by a founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, isn’t all that much different from some perspectives from being funded by the government, it is nevertheless a historic step.

At a time when government is not doing the job it once did in capturing the public’s imagination about space, the private sector is stepping in to reinforce the idea that an age is just starting.

As it has for 100 years, aviation claims a central role in making the future look better, in making the present exciting, in sparking the imagination. That’s as big a role as moving people hither and yon.