Monday morning marked a historic event for both science and private enterprise alike when veteran test pilot Michael Melvill became the first private astronaut in space.

Costing a mere $20 million (chump change compared to the price tag of an average NASA mission), SpaceShipOne reached an altitude of 100 kilometers, officially considered to be the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.

In case you missed its performance, there will be an encore — the SpaceShipOne team is one of many teams competing for the Ansari X-Prize, a privately backed award of $10 million to the first team to create an entirely privately funded reusable launch vehicle.

In order to win, the craft must be able to make the journey twice in a two-week period while replacing only 10 percent or less of the vehicle’s non-propellant mass.

Likewise, to even be eligible for competition, the craft must receive no government funding nor be developed in any way through government subsidy, grants or contracts. Further, to demonstrate its commercial viability, it must have room for at least three passengers (including pilot), with the crew returning in sound health.

What SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize competition have brought about is an entirely new frontier for space travel. Indeed, with the advent of relatively inexpensive spaceflight and mass-produced spacecrafts, the door has now opened for a slew of space-tourism and other space-related private industries — all without one thin dime of government assistance.

Although government space travel has been plagued with cost overruns, the inertia of bureaucratic culture and agonizingly slow progress toward true civilian entry into space, the private sector has rushed forth with its own solution.

In the coming years, the descendants of SpaceShipOne will demonstrate that the government is unnecessary to manned space travel, if not an obstacle in and of itself.

Despite the fact that it has been 40 years since NASA put a man on the moon, government-funded space travel hasn’t grown any cheaper or more accessible to private individuals.

NASA’s bureaucratic hostility to opening up space to private entrepreneurship was clear in 2001, when it rebuffed billionaire Dennis Tito’s lucrative offer of $20 million to ride along as a space tourist to the International Space Station, only for the opportunity to be rather ironically snatched up by the space program of formerly communist Russia.

This bureaucratic culture did not evolve in a vacuum, of course — it has been the product of years of Congressional micromanagement combined with parsimonious budgets and extravagant expectations.

Case in point — Bush’s costly Mars initiative, with only a fraction of the necessary funding being proposed. Politics have manifested even in the engineering side of government-backed space travel, most prominently in our stubborn insistence upon relying upon the shuttle program which never met its original goals of being a cost-effective reusable launch vehicle.

Contrast this to private space ventures, cost-constrained by investors who expect to see tangible results, ultimately to produce a product that consumers will pay for.

The first and most obvious market — space tourism— is the one which NASA has shunned, leaving private entrepreneurs to seize upon the opportunity.

Someday, there may even be private space voyages or even space colonization. At this point however, all but the first are still the stuff of science fiction.

The best thing the government could do now for space travel would be to simply stay out of the way.

Of course, this is exactly the opposite of what they are doing right now — Edward L. Hudgins, editor of “Space: The Free-Market Frontier,” remarked in his testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space & Aeronautics that “the demand for trips into space by private citizens offers a potential market that could usher in a breakthrough in the fight to lower the costs of traveling to space. However, government-mandated regulations keep space inaccessible to most entrepreneurs as well as to the general public.”

In addition, he noted a litany of regulations from unfair competition with government-backed projects to unclear liability rules for private space ventures.

The success of SpaceShipOne will not bring about the space travel of Star Trek tomorrow, but what it does demonstrate is the ultimate superiority of the free market over government solutions to tackle problems.

All that ties us to the surly bonds of gravity now is red tape.