SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize following a successful — and apparently flawless — second flight this morning. I don’t have much else to say on this subject that I haven’t said already. Oddly enough, this news is something of a let-down for me because it all happened so according-to-plan. Not that I wanted to see the vehicle explode or anything, but it just seemed to be so… easy. Even a little ho-hum, as if this privately funded civilian spacecraft thing has already become old hat. But then that’s the way we want it to be, isn’t it? Nice and easy, nothing remarkable. Easy enough for an ordinary person to book a flight to the orbiting Hilton for the weekend. The future is coming, my friends…

I’m posting this fairly late, so the people who would be interested in this story probably already know about it. If, however, you haven’t seen the news, this has been a historic day for human spaceflight.

Early this morning, SpaceShipOne, the plucky little rocket plane I recently wrote about, dropped away from its mother ship, ignited its onboard motor, and arrowed upward to an altitude of 62 miles, becoming the first manned, non-governmental vehicle to reach outer space.

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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.

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One of my earliest ambitions was to be a Starship Captain. At some point, however, I realized that the human race was still a helluva long way from building anything like James T. Kirk’s USS Enterprise, so I lowered my sights a bit and decided instead that I would become an astronaut. This was around the time that NASA was glide-testing its newest toy, the space shuttle Enterprise (which was named after the fictional Star Trek vessel), by taking it aloft on the back of a 747 and releasing it to fly, unpowered, back to the ground. It was an exciting time for a young boy who was interested in space, but too young to remember the Apollo missions. It seemed like we — the human race in general and Americans in particular — were on the verge of Great Things. I used to imagine myself piloting (or at least working aboard) a second-generation space shuttle, commuting between a busy spaceport on Earth and a wheel-shaped station in Earth orbit. I didn’t think this was a mere daydream. I was convinced that it would happen. It seemed inevitable that human beings would one day answer the same siren song that has always compelled us to see what was over the next hill, the same call that caused us to walk out of Africa and go sailing across the uncharted oceans. I used to believe that humans would go to the stars simply because they’re there, and that it would happen in my lifetime.

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