Media attention was focused on St. Louis recently, and this time it wasn’t because of Nelly’s new sport drink or a trailer park that got leveled by a tornado.

On Monday, June 21, 63-year-old Michael Melvill successfully piloted SpaceShipOne – an experimental spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites Inc. – into space and back, making it the “first ever privately funded manned space flight,” according to the Guiness Book of World Records.

Part of the motivation for this historic flight is the Ansari X Prize, which was launched here in St. Louis in 1996. The headquarters of the X Prize are appropriately located on Spirit of St. Louis Boulevard, as the competition was inspired by the Orteig Prize, which Charles Lindbergh won for his 1927 trans-Atlantic flight.

The $25,000 Orteig Prize was a lot of money at the time, but the X Prize has upped the ante a bit since then. The offer is $10 million to the first team that can privately finance, build and launch a spaceship able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles), return safely to Earth, and then be able to repeat the launch with the same ship within two weeks.

A pretty tall order, but the SpaceShipOne team is well on its way. Although Ansari has announced that the prize will expire at the end of this year if it has not been claimed, the SpaceShipOne team is cautiously optimistic that the goal is within reach.

I wonder, though, if the X Prize cash is really the motivation behind it all. Microsoft co-founder and Charter Communications majority shareholder Paul Allen has reportedly funneled more than $20 million into the SpaceShipOne project. All of a sudden that $10 million prize seems a lot less important. In fact, when you consider the billions of dollars the U.S. alone has devoted to space exploration in the last 30 years, $10 million seems like a drop in the bucket.

The truth is there are many such as myself for whom the dream of civilian space travel is much more important than any dollar value one might assign. So far two intrepid (and wealthy) civilians have paid $20 million each for a chance to travel to space in a Russian Soyuz rocket and spend some time on the International Space Station. Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth have shown it can be done, and more are planning to follow in their footsteps. It takes lots of money to make it happen – money that the cash-strapped Russian space program dearly needs – but those who have done it say that you really can’t place a price on the experience, and for them it was worth every penny.

I believe them. Yes, SpaceShipOne is about the business of furthering civilian aerospace technology, and the chance for those involved perhaps to reap the benefits of regular space tourism in the future. There is no denying that economic factors are a strong motivation for their efforts. But this is one case in which the money seems refreshingly secondary to the dream that SpaceShipOne and its competitors want to transform into reality. It is good to know there are still a few more important things than the almighty dollar.

Regards,

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