SpaceX was founded 11 years ago. In that time it has spent about a billion dollars to construct several rocket engines, launch vehicles capable of geo transfer missions, a capsule that is doing cargo missions to the ISS and will soon be used to bring people there.

Half that money was private investment, and they got a payload in orbit with nothing but private investment. The rest was advance payments on missions they have been hired to do for NASA and private customers (mostly NASA until recently).

NASA put men on the moon 45 years ago, and we haven't been back. The Saturn V sits in a park and is a nest for owls. The Shuttle is in museums. The Space Station is a marvel of technology, like the Shuttle, but is eating anywhere from 2 to 3 billion a year, and will eventually be dumped into the sea like Skylab.

There is no Schadenfreude or gloating here. I hate this state of affairs as much as anyone who loves spaceflight. I grew up on the space visions of Ley, Von Braun, and Kubrick. But by the time I got to college, the university's space program consisted of payloads for weather balloons, and by the time the Shuttle finally flew, I was already in the middle of my first space company startup.

My own efforts to get private space off the ground didn't succeed in and of themselves, but some of the people who are in the business now are graduates of companies I helped found, or were inspired by what we did (Richard Branson). Be nice if I had a bigger piece of the action (although I am doing work right now on a contract from Virgin Galactic) but this is much, much better than if the whole industry had just plain died.

There are private companies working on launch systems, space station components, lunar rovers, and many other components for space exploration.

I will lay bets that the next people who take a turn around the Moon and return to Earth will be privately funded, and will likely have paid big bucks for the privilege.