It is an exciting time for space enthusiasts. Last week’s flight of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne caught my attention and started me thinking about the possibility of civilians doing what NASA has been unable to do, namely establish a significant human presence beyond the boundaries of our home planet. Today I see that Rutan isn’t alone in this venture. According to the BBC, an unmanned, amateur-built rocket has successfully reached an altitude of 100 kilometers (a little over 62 miles high), becoming the first amateur rocket to enter space.

Unlike SpaceShipOne, which is privately-owned but was constructed by an professional aerospace company called Scaled Composites, this rocket genuinely appears to be the work of amateurs, average Joes and Janes who belong to a group called the Civilian Space eXploration Team, or CSXT. Looking at the group’s Web site, I couldn’t quite tell what their ultimate purpose is other than to get their rocket into space and attract attention. They do have corporate sponsors and the site does include some copy about space being “the next great business environment [which] will soon be accessible to civilians and companies of every size.” However, there is nothing about whether they intend to try launching payloads or build a manned craft. I don’t get the impression that they’re interested in trying for the X-prize, so they’re not technically competition for Rutan. Maybe they don’t have any more purpose than hobbyists who build model smaller rockets and launch them from the salt flats near the Great Salt Lake. For them, it’s an exercise in engineering and an act of love. Perhaps the CSXT is the same, only on a larger scale.

Regardless of their reasons for doing it, the CSXT has demonstrated that governments aren’t the only entities that can build and fly a vehicle beyond the atmosphere. There will be orbiting stations and routine shuttlecraft flights some day, but increasingly it looks to me like it will be corporations and private citizens that make it happen, not NASA. Perhaps the first human on Mars won’t be representing the United States per se, but rather a consortium of sponsoring companies that have plastered the side of the landing craft with logos that will be visible on-camera. Elegant? No. I don’t exactly relish the idea of spacecraft looking like something from a NASCAR race. But selling out like that just might get the job done…