Headlines were won today by one of those billionaires turned dreamers turned financiers of spacemen. Jeff Bezos, founder of internet retailer Amazon, revealed through his astronautic company Blue Origin a prototype vehicle, one intended to propel upward men who purchase tickets therefor. In these heady days when one can privately shoot a homemade, manned rocket into the air, Bezos joins fellow entrepreneurs Paul Allen and Sir Richard Branson. Allen supplied monies for SpaceShipOne, the craft that won the suitably neologist X Prize Foundation's low-orbit competition. Branson has invested in successor SpaceShipTwo and started his own space transport and tourism service, Virgin Galactic, pending the necessary astro-yachts.
A good free marketeer accedes to the practice of profit, insofar as some people contrive material success that happens to depend on pleasing other people, and rests that case against one for public science and learning. Granted, the state can certainly achieve what elected and appointed servants intended: leaps in aerotechnology in both World Wars, the atomic bomb, electronic data intercommunication. But it is the private sector that has run with these ideas: transcontinental flights to about anyplace, nuclear commodities, the local area network and the internet, alternative media wherein all this can be discussed, there you go.
To NASA went billions, to the moon went men — and for the treasure of knowledge, the inventions that were incidental but are today essential, the national space program deals mostly in robots and crews of seven that could one day be younger than their vehicles. Presidents say "moon" or "Mars," and then, quietly, identify a year some decades away. Jeff Bezos, then, can spend money on as many gumdrop-shaped starships as it takes for man to fly on gumdrop-shaped starships, probably far more than, say, a young Senator Walter Mondale would have allowed for The Final Frontier.
Still, the same day, there are two little rovers creeping around on Mars. The taxpayer funded a mission ninety Mars-days long, yet Spirit and Opportunity are still working after one thousand. Decadal longevity is typical for government programs, yes, but very few projects yield dividends like the Mars rovers. Let Branson and Bezos take us to the stars; send a little more money to Spirit and Opportunity, care of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.