There’s an article at Space.com that says that the Columbia disaster hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the X-Prize or public space travel. If anything, it’s enhanced it.

And here’s a good roundup of what’s going on in the current issue of Wired (via an anonymous commenter in this post). Some choice bits:

Thompson and Ressi are after more than profit, though. Having participated in and grown rich from the Internet revolution while still in their twenties, they have boundless faith in their own power and importance, not to mention the power of technology. They feel betrayed by NASA, which promised so much with those first ounces on the moon. It’s been 34 years since Armstrong took his small step, and they’re still waiting for the next leap, for colonies on Mars and the liftoff of the starship Enterprise.

“For the dotcom folks who got a lot of money in tech ventures,” says Thompson, “the evolution from mainframe machines to the PC is parallel to the shift from the traditional space industry to space tourism. Yes, the X Prize is suborbital. But that’s just a baby step, like the first PC. People said there’d never be a market for them and look what happened. Most techies are geeks who as kids read science fiction, and we all dream of something grander.”

Ressi nods with Buddha-like certainty as three more flasks of sake arrive. “I saw the potential of the Internet to change the world,” he says. “Now I believe the world will be meaningless without the changes that going to space will bring.

“Of course I won’t recoup the money I put into X Prize in the next 10 years,” he says, refilling cups all around. “If space tourism works, some folks will make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But that’s not my focus. History has proved that exploration is always worth the cost and risk. There’s just no way to guarantee human survival unless we move off this planet – and our days as a space-faring race start the moment someone wins the X Prize.”

And this one, from John Carmack:

Carmack is pragmatic about how space exploration is luring him away from gaming. “We’re always pushing hard for innovations in our gaming software, but if I disappeared tomorrow there’d be a lot of people doing similar things,” he says. “It’s appalling how in aerospace, we’ve been using the same stuff for decades. There’s a big difference between what’s been done and what’s been possible and that’s the definition of opportunity…”

…”I think there’s definitely a tourism market,” he says, “but I don’t know that it’s huge.” That’s why he’s looking at making a variety of spacecraft that could do everything from carry tourists to launch trinkets – or even go orbital. “You’ve got to build a lot of vehicles to learn. Space has been mythologized way out of proportion,” Carmack says. “We’ve just not had enough people doing it to be comfortable with the challenges. We’re blas