Commercial spaceflight promises to open space to everyone.
On October 4, 2004, Spaceshipone became the first privately built vehicle in history to achieve the altitude of 62 miles twice in two weeks, winning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for Spaceflight. With this flight, Burt Ratan and his company Scaled Composites broke the monopoly held by governments over reaching space.
Scaled Composite’s success almost immediately bred more success when Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin companies partnered with Burt Ratan to form Virgin Galactic, the first commercial spaceflight company in the world.Since then, dozens of companies around the world have entered the race to launch humans into space, spurred by private investment and a growing number of prizes and contests. Currently, there are prizes for everything from landing a rover on the moon to building probes to explore the outer reaches of the solar system.
Other companies include SpaceX, Blue Origin, and SpaceDev.
All of this interest and effort could easily translate into the opening of space to the rest of us. As these companies and prizes drive the development of space technology forward, that technology becomes less expensive and more widespread. If it becomes cheap and widespread enough, then it becomes available to more of us to use.
Of course, the questions of how commercial spaceflight will benefit most of us remains to be answered, but the fact that the question exists at all is part of the benefit. By opening a new frontier to all of us, commercial spaceflight has the potential to fire the imagination and inventiveness of people in ways we do not even know about yet.