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The critical variable for measuring progress in the effort of humankind to get into space is examining how much currency it takes to take a certain amount of mass into orbit. The more efficiently it can be done, the less humanity will be shackled to one planet.

For a long time space travel has been thought of as so expensive that it was the province of governments. Yet governments are notoriously bad at spending money to undertake revolutionary or even evolutionary innovations.

Private space travel is going to put some shame into the debacle that is government funded space travel. Far less money, far more impressive results. Burt Rutan designed SpaceShip One (http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/), a private space ship that reached into the boundary of space. Here he is explaining why government funded space travel sucks at innovation: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=b_rutan

Now Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, which greatly decreases the cost of getting to space, has launched successfully enough to prove that rockets much cheaper than the prior state of the art can reach space: http://crunchgear.com/2007/03/20/spacex-successfully-launches-falcon-1-rocket/#more-5140

These achievements are important not just in themselves, but for the new capital, new ideas, and new entrepreneurs they will attract into the quest to reach for the stars above.

Have you ever tried looking at a far away object, but had an annoyingly bright light source nearby? It helps to put your hand up, and block off the nearby light source or reflection. I think I first tried doing this at about age 5.

NASA’s latest telescope does something very similar, but on a more sophisticated level. The James Webb Space Telescope has an eight million-pixel infrared detector (that’s the telescope’s eye). In front of the detector there are 62,000 shutters measures 100 by 200 microns, or roughly the width of three to six human hairs, arranged in four identical grids in a layout of 171 rows by 365 columns. The shutters can close to help the detector only detect weaker sources of far away light.

For more, check out the NASA press release: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/jan/HQ_07014_Webb_microshutters.html

Jeff Bezos’s company, Blue Origin, tested a rocket that takes off vertically, and then lands vertically, in the same spot. Pretty neat. Find out more from space.com at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/070104_bezos_blueorigin_updt.html, or from Blue Origin’s website at http://public.blueorigin.com/index.html

I’m excited that alot of private ventures are trying to get into space. NASA has had a monopoly on space travel for far too long, retarding innovation.