No private agency has of yet even demonstrated the mastery over science and engineering to do this.

Is that quite so true? Do you really think they can’t do it, and not that they won’t? It’s not like NASA has its own special breed of engineers they grow in vats, you know. I rather think that no private agency has yet demonstrated the gargantuan amounts of cash required. Cost of the Apollo project (as given by Wikipedia.org): $25.4 billion. Even if it only cost a private entity one tenth as much, private entities usually want to see some kind of return on their $2.5B.

Dennis Tito paid ~$20 million for a ride to ISS, as did Mark Shuttleworth, and at least two other people whose names I’m forgetting. I personally know people who’ve paid to fly to the edge of space in a russian fighter. A friend of mine has already taken deposits for suborbital lobs in the vehicle he’s developing (first flights next year). Space tourism is not just not retarded, it’s going to make some people very rich.

To each their own: Personally, I think Branson and Colonial Williamsburg are retarded tourism concepts, and yet (unlike Disney’s California Adventure) more and more people keep going back…

The X prize, while definately being a big positive, should not be oversold. In the 1950s, the US achieved sub-orbital flight in just six years after Sputnik. Just ten years after that, we landed men on the moon and returned them safely. All at enormous cost, of course.

JPL and NASA, while big, ungainly, and expensive, routinely send probes to other planets. No private agency has of yet even demonstrated the mastery over science and engineering to do this.

Don’t tout the X-prize as something monumental. It may seed a developing, self-supportive space market, but don’t count on it.

“Keep an eye on this one, because soon, anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars may be able to take a ride on a rocketship.”

Well, I have news for you. Space is big. And most of it is empty. It’s so big, that it would take months or years of high-velocity travel just to get anywhere interesting (like Mars for example). And truly, there isn’t a whole lot to see, anyway. Space is boring. And extremely dangerous. Space Tourism is a retarded concept!

This prize has already shaken loose about an order of magnitude more money than the purse. Paul Allen has put up $20-30 million, and other teams are into it for multiple millions each. I’m pretty sure that both the Canadian teams have spent well over a million, ditto Starchaser, Armadillo has spent just over a million, and so on.

Equally important, the Ansari X-Prize has vaulted the prize idea onto NASA’s radar. The Millenium Challenges are prizes (purse and objectives to be determined) for spaceflight relevant accomplishments. The way NASA is doing it isn’t the smartest (time limits, for example, and the total amount of money isn’t anywhere near large enough – only $20 million), but it’s a start.

This is the way technology development used to be done, and it worked great.