From the Ayn Rand Institute:
IRVINE, CA–On Monday SpaceShipOne made its winning flight, destroying forever the myth that space exploration can be done only by the government.
Space exploration, as the grandest of man’s technological advancements, requires the kind of bold innovation possible only to minds left free to face the vast universe directly. By placing the space program under government funding, we necessarily insert the corrupting barrier of bureaucratic whim between the reasoning mind and the facts of reality. The results are obvious: the space program is a political animal, mired in shifting, inconsistent, arbitrary and ill-defined goals.
SpaceShipOne has now taken the first free-market steps toward the stars. If the government, exercising its proper function, established a system of private property rights in space, free industry would have ample incentive to reach and exploit stellar bodies. Ahead of these bold space entrepreneurs lie enormous technical difficulties, the solution of which will require even more heroic determination than that which tamed the seas and the continents. To solve them, America must unleash its best minds–as only the free market can do.