I spent over half my life trying to get private spaceflight "off the ground" so to speak. Turned out the best way to get investment in your space company was to be rich enough from something else to actually be the investor. So it goes.

But I have to say I'm really glad to see it happening now, even if I'm watching from the sidelines. Between SpaceX, Bigelow, and others, there is a broad and robust private space industry building, with all the tools needed to put humanity into space in a big way. And they're going to figure out how to make big money doing it, unlike NASA, which is actually legally prohibited from doing so, and had no real incentive to control costs or be creative in low-cost design tradeoffs.