Early Tuesday morning in balmy Cape Canaveral, Florida a rocket blasted off into orbit. With reason, residents of the Space Coast slept through it, as if it were just another rocket deploying satellites used for navigation, communication, or research. Hundreds of times over the last thirty years residents watched as unmanned rockets and manned Space Shuttles lifted off from the Space Center. It’s been a long time since the residents of the area were genuinely excited about a launch, and this time wasn’t much different. While Mark Zuckerburg monetizing your personal information and Mitt Romney’s latest quote about religion dominates headlines, SpaceX is boldly challenging the paradigm of what privately funded ventures can do in space.

In recent years the future of American spaceflight has seemed pretty grim, particularly where I grew up, on Florida’s Space Coast. Manned space flight in the US halted because our aging Space Shuttle fleet was retired before a replacement vehicle was ready. Due to the termination of the Shuttle program combined with our country’s anemic economy, the frequency of launches from the Cape decreased over the last few years and many high tech jobs left the area.

Throughout my life I’ve heard many smart people share a very specific sentiment about the problem with NASA, “The future of space flight is grim if the government doesn’t allocate more money to NASA.”

It’s a fairly easy conclusion to come to, particularly for residents who are hyper-aware of what’s going on with NASA. It is natural that locals don’t want the government-funded space program to have less funding and influence, which is why this sentiment easily resonates with many.

The problem is, the fleet of Space Shuttles we’d been using were a technology of the 1970s and were prohibitively expensive. High costs and a long lag time between launches were the huge pitfalls of NASA’s most coveted spacecraft. A new-age launch vehicle has been on the horizon for years, and it doesn’t seem any closer to materializing than when George Bush vowed we’d return to the moon in 2004.

When the Shuttle Program was terminated, a mostly sad sentiment was pervasive in public and media discourse. However, a glimmer of hope for progress in space emerged. NASA announced that it would pay private companies to deliver cargo to the Space Station.

Prior to this announcement Paypal co-founder and billionaire Elon Musk was busy testing a rocket and space capsule of his own. He plans to challenge the way we’ve always thought about space, a government-exclusive science project..

The successful launch of the Dragon Spacecraft Tuesday is a landmark event for space exploration and scientific progress. But Friday Space X faces its final test when it will attempt to dock with the International Space Station and deliver the 1000 lbs of supplies it brought from earth. Successful completion of this difficult task will earn them a bundle of future contracts from the US government which will cover launch costs as well as fund research and development for future missions.

Like other sectors of the market economy, where there is an untapped potential for profit, private capital will rush in. Over the next 5 years I expect that it will become increasingly common and profitable for SpaceX to carry cargo to the ISS. Additionally, competitors are emerging and they are setting their sights on similar goals. All-in-all everybody benefits from this competitiveness. Launch costs will reduce over the next decade and the frontier of space will become increasingly accessible to ordinary people and private companies.

I predict that a successful cargo delivery by SpaceX will be a landmark change in the economics of space flight. In the long-term I think this mission marks an important shift in our attitude toward private enterprise in space. Sentiment toward the future of space flight remains grim throughout the Space Coast, but Tuesday’s launch and Saturday’s docking with the Space Station should begin to spur a newfound optimism for what our species can achieve beyond this planet.