It somehow seemed appropriate that SpaceShipOne took off from an airstrip in the Mojave desert just a few miles from Edwards Air Force Base. For it was at Edwards that a postwar generation of test pilots with ice water in their veins – members of what Tom Wolfe called the “Brotherhood of the Right Stuff” – took up one experimental rocket plane after another to push the outside of the envelope.

Their leader was Chuck Yeager, the drawling World War II fighter ace from the coal fields of West Virginia who on October 14, 1947, broke the sound barrier notwithstanding a couple of broken ribs that made it almost impossible for him to seal his cockpit hatch. Mr. Yeager’s plane was designated the Bell X-1, and it was the first in a series of rocket ships that would eventually reach the lower limits of outer space, now defined as 62.5 miles above sea level. The last was the X-15, which between 1961-68 set a number of speed and altitude records for piloted flight.

The Air Force was planning even more ambitious rocket ships like the X-20 – an orbital space plane – but they were scrapped in favor of NASA’s quick and dirty approach of lofting capsules into space aboard disposable rockets and recovering them at sea. The boys at Edwards might have scoffed at “spam in a can” – their nickname for astronauts who had almost no control over their own vehicles – but the public lapped it up. All the resources went to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, while the dream of a truly reusable space plane was put on hold.

The Space Shuttle program, which began in 1972, was but a pale simulacrum of that hope. The cost for each launch, which was supposed to be $10 million to $12 million, soared to over $450 million. The turnaround time between flights, supposed to be a few days, became a few months even in the best of times. This isn’t the best of times since once again a catastrophic accident – the explosion of the Columbia orbiter in 2003 – has put the entire shuttle program on hiatus. Yet, while NASA has been grounded, the private sector has roared ahead.

Skeptics will scoff at what Burt Rutan, the designer of SpaceShipOne, accomplished. They will note, rightly, that spending a few minutes in suborbital flight is no more than what Alan Shepard achieved in his Mercury capsule 43 years ago. And the method Mr. Rutan used – hauling a cigar-shaped rocket ship into the sky aboard a mother ship – duplicates the approach of the X planes from that same long-gone age.

Mr. Rutan’s achievement is nevertheless enormous: He has rescued manned space flight from the dead end NASA reached after the end of the Moon landings in 1972. Space-ShipOne has shown the way toward the development of a space industry that can pick up where government has left off by turning space travel into something approximating airplane travel in the 1930s: a luxury good that is not out of reach for the well-to-do.

Where SpaceShipOne led, plenty are eager to follow. Richard Branson announced that Virgin Atlantic will license Mr. Rutan’s design to take tourists into space in 2007.Several other private firms are also building suborbital spacecraft. Others are working to collect a potential $50 million prize for the first private manned vehicle to orbit the earth. The promoter of the orbital award, hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow, is also working to loft his own space station, which would be available for rent. Who knows? Maybe we will finally achieve what “2001: A Space Odyssey” took for granted when it was released in 1968: regular passenger flights to the moon.

All of that might have sounded pie-in-the-sky a few weeks ago. Not anymore.

What’s NASA’s role in all this? The president’s space commission, which issued its report in June, had the right idea: NASA needs to get out of the business of hauling cargo into orbit. It should leave that mission to the private sector and concentrate on deep-space exploration and scientific research whose fruits will be shared with industry.

The model should be the early days of aviation in the 1920s-1930s.Washington didn’t set up its own airline. Instead it offered contracts to private carriers to deliver airmail. Many of them began hauling passengers on the side, giving birth to major airlines like United, American, and TWA. Likewise, space travel needs to be developed primarily by private companies with some federal subsidies.

That represents a huge change from the government-centric paradigm that America, Russia, Europe, and others have been pursuing for decades, and it is sure to be resisted by NASA die-hards. But who can argue with success? SpaceShipOne has just blasted in a hole in the argument that private space travel can’t get off the ground.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this first appeared.