It’s been an exciting day for spaceflight enthusiasts, almost like the one 24 years ago when my dad woke me at the crack of dawn to watch the first launch of space shuttle Columbia. That day so long ago was one of the rare bonding moments I shared with my father as I was growing up. Dad worked odd shifts at his job and I rarely saw him when I was very young; to this day, we don’t know much about each other and it’s difficult for us to talk, something we both regret. On the day of Columbia‘s first flight, Mom had told us not to wake her until T-minus thirty, so it was just us boys, sitting in front of the old console TV with the clunky manual knobs, suffering through interminable countdown delays while we waited for that gleaming white fantasy-machine to hurl itself skyward. I remember that Dad fixed me my very own cup of coffee that morning. It was more milk than coffee, and I’d had the sticky mixture before so it wasn’t any big coming-of-age ritual or anything, but it was a rare, precious experience to be dunking coconut-chocolate chip cookies and drinking coffee with my dad as we impatiently waited for something to occur.

Dad’s never been the dreamer that I am. As far as I know, he’s never seriously pondered life on other planets or imagined a human presence beyond this world. But he does have a passion for unusual machines. We were never able to talk about Star Wars, but we could talk about space shuttles.

I don’t remember if we thought to wake Mom in time, but I do recall that both of us were on the edge of our seats as the timer clicked off the last few seconds, waiting to see what this new, advanced vessel, this incredible vehicle that was supposed to open space to the world, would do when its engines ignited. I’d seen stock footage of the Apollo launches; Dad had watched them live when they originally happened. The Apollo capsules and the Saturn V rockets that drove them to the Moon were amazing, impressive machines. But they could only be used one time each. You just couldn’t imagine average people ever being able to ride in one; they were too expensive, too exotic.

But the shuttle was different — it was reusable, something we now take more or less for granted, but in the ’70s a real mind-bender of an idea. Reusability meant that the Flash Gordon ideal of your very own rocket ship, which you could just hop into and roar off into the sky whenever the bad guys were chasing you, was within the realm of possibility. And the shuttle looked different, too. Instead of a single, cylindrical body like the more-traditional rockets, this thing was an amalgamation of four separate components, awkward-looking and yet cool in its own way. The orbiter itself looked like an airplane. You could imagine one landing at Salt Lake International, in theory anyway, and (at the time) I could imagine one easily taking off again after picking up one particular Utah boy who was crazy to get to space. I don’t know what Dad was imagining, if he was thinking speculative thoughts at all, but I know I was imagining the time when I’d finally be able to ride a space shuttle into the velvety black, where I’d have all sorts of adventures and know that my life made a difference to the people back home on that little blue marble.

When Columbia‘s engines thundered to life, Dad and I both leaned forward in anticipation, and when she suddenly sprang upward from her pad — so different from the slow, agonizing lift-off of the Saturn V stack — we both jerked back into our chairs. We didn’t move our eyes from the screen for several minutes, not until the shuttle had climbed beyond the range of the news cameras and there was only a live photo of a smoke-column on the TV screen, and then we turned to each other with big, happy grins. We’d just seen the future. Or so we thought.

We all know what happened, in time. The future I imagined that day never came to pass. Columbia fell to Earth like Icarus and only a few short months ago I was despairing that no one cared about going into space anymore. My dreams of being like Captain Kirk or Han Solo were dead and I had lowered my eyes to the familiar terrestrial horizon.

And then along came SpaceShipOne, the tiny, funny-looking vehicle I first wrote about way back in June. Today that odd little craft, which looks to me like the spindle from an old-fashioned spinning wheel taped to a boomerang, successfully made the first of two runs needed to win the Ansari X-Prize, a ten million dollar purse that’s been offered to the first private organization to safely launch three men (or their equivalent weight, in this case) into suborbital space twice within two weeks.

Today’s experience was quite a bit different from Columbia Day way back when. Instead of watching it happen on TV with my dad, I was at work, seated in front of a computer monitor instead of a TV screen, and drinking fully-leaded (but, for the record, really awful) convenience-store coffee from a foam cup. (Sans cookies, too… *sigh*) I wasn’t able to watch any live video of the flight. But I was nonetheless fully aware of what was happening, thanks to a technology I never imagined back in 1980, the all-powerful Internet. And when the blogs started reporting that SS1 was in the air, free of its mother ship and “lighting the candle,” I leaned forward in my office chair, just like I did 24 years ago. Suddenly I was thinking of a future in space again… and I’m not alone.

Film directors John Landis and James Cameron were at the “spaceport” in the Mojave Desert, along with several hundred (thousand?) unknown non-celebrities, all watching SS1’s run for the prize and dreaming of what comes next. Earlier this week, eccentric gazillionaire Richard Branson announced that his company, the Virgin Group, would be licensing the SpaceShipOne design, with the intent to build “spaceliners” for the purpose of carrying paying passengers into the black at a mere $200K a head. (I’m not being facetious, by the way; in spaceflight terms, $200,000, while admittedly still beyond the reach of most people, is unbelievably affordable. Read more about Virgin Galactic, as Branson calls his new service, here.) Branson plans to have his space-tourist business up and running with a fleet of five “SS1s” by 2007, a mere three years away. If that’s too long to wait, however, starting in October the Zero-G Experience (operated by the same gentleman who started the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis) will take you up in an ordinary airplane and fly a few parabolic dips to give you the sensation of weightlessness, just like NASA’s astronauts get on the legendary “Vomit Comet.” And Robert Bigelow, yet another eccentric gazillionaire, has reportedly offered $50 million to the first private organization to get a spacecraft in orbit. (SpaceShipOne is only capable of suborbital flight.)

My point here is that people are suddenly thinking and talking about space again, in a positive and enthusiastic way that I haven’t really heard since the mid-80s. Suddenly it all seems possible again, the dreams of orbiting factories and hotels and laboratories, serviced by inexpensive, reusable vehicles straight out of a science fiction movie. The space shuttle failed to live up to its promise and its purpose. NASA failed to build on its achievements. But now someone is building on the past and moving forward. SpaceShipOne is proving, one thrilling, fifteen-minute flight at a time, that there really can be a human future in space.

It’s possible, of course, that all of this will amount to nothing, that the X-prize and SpaceShipOne will amount to nothing more than a stunt, just as the Apollo program ultimately did. But I really hope not. Now, more than ever before, I think human beings — Americans, especially — need to imagine a future beyond the visible horizon. I need to imagine that it’s still possible that someday, maybe decades from now but still within my lifetime, it will be possible for me to take my ride in a rocketship.

SpaceShipOne is expected to make its second run for the X-Prize sometime next week, possibly as early as Monday. I can’t wait…