Is it just a coincidence that Southern Nevada started to look like the epicenter of the burgeoning private space industry this week?

Yes, after 30 years of effort, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne finally launched from California's nearby Mojave Spaceport -- a facility into which the California Legislature recently agreed to invest another $11 million -- late last year.

But there seemed to be something other than the availability of desert real estate resonating at the NewSpace 2006 conference, which wound up today at the Flamingo Las Vegas.

Lonnie Hammargren, seeking to become Nevada's once and future lieutenant governor, showed up to announce he's included in his campaign platform a call to establish a commercial space launch facility at the Nevada Test Site.

And it was hard to miss the North Las Vegas connection of Bigelow Aerospace, whose Genesis I spacecraft inflated as planned and successfully deployed its solar power arrays after being launched atop a Russian SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile on July 12.

Although such a premise was considered little more than science fiction only a few years ago (see Victor Koman's "Kings of the Wild Frontier"), few would now deny -- as NASA struggles to keep in operation a lumbering shuttle fleet that's never flown as high, as often or as inexpensively as promised -- that the most exciting prospects for the exploration and utilization of space are coming from the private sector.

Few developments make this clearer than the willingness of NASA to place its Ames Research Center GeneBox experiment (testing the impact of near-weightlessness on genes in microscopic cells) aboard Genesis I as a "courtesy payload."

The collaboration between NASA and Bigelow Aerospace -- an outfit funded by Robert Bigelow with profits from his Budget Suites of America hotel chain -- "reflects the emerging focus on government and commercial partnerships in entrepreneurial space endeavors," comments Genebox project manager John Hines.

Sounds fine. But who would ever have imagined that "government-business partnership," in 2006, would mean private business developing the spacecraft, and government hitching the ride?

The Flamingo Las Vegas simultaneously hosted the three-day third Lunar Commerce Executive Roundtable, at which 75 or so aerospace leaders, bankers and academicians discussed the development of new commercial applications and activities in space. Attendees spoke of the potential for space-based solar power plants, as well as space- or lunar-based manufacturing.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, told attendees at the NewSpace 2006 conference he's bullish about the possibilities of commercial space tourism.

Randy Lovell, space systems business and strategy development manager for the Northrop Grumman Corp., agreed -- predicting there could be 5 million passengers in space before 2030. "Long-term we're talking cruise ships to the moon," he said. Serving something a little more appetizing than Tang in the banquet room, hopefully.

Many of these promised technologies will take a lot longer to reach commercial viability than advertised, of course -- as anyone reviewing a "portrait of the future" magazine article from the 1930s or '40s, with its confident depiction of a private helicopter parked next to every home, can attest.

On the other hand, as little as 40 years ago even computer experts (accustomed to card-sorting machines that occupied entire rooms) scoffed at the idea that it would ever be possible -- let alone that there would be sufficient consumer demand -- to place "personal computers" in every home. Nor were there many visionaries, as little as 25 years ago, predicting how commonplace pocket-size wireless communicators, Global Positioning Satellite gadgets, and Internet access would become within a single generation.

In years past, one could have envisioned the government stepping in and attempting to block such healthy private entrepreneurship, arguing space is "too risky" and "too important" to allow access by any but government bureaucrats.

Today, that would be as absurd as announcing that henceforth government agencies alone would be responsible for all new technological development in aviation and computer science -- private firms need not apply.

When flexibility and innovation are called for, nothing has ever succeeded like the profit-seeking free market.

The current scramble by entrepreneurs to find profit opportunities in space is to be celebrated, not only because it will inevitably lead to the most progress at the fastest rate, but also because it opens, quite literally, a "new frontier" for the generation of wealth and human progress.

Is it just a coincidence of geography and climate that Southern Nevada, long a land that encouraged just such risk-taking entrepreneurial activity, now starts to show promise as an epicenter for this industry?

We don't think so.