I was prowling the headlines in Google News earlier, as I am oft to do when I want to know what's going wrong in the world without getting too immersed in all the crap, and I noticed a fun one. As of about 4 PM yesterday, SpaceX is now the first privately-funded company to put a liquid-fuel craft into orbit. This is the fourth try by these folks, the last of which carried Jame's Doohan's ashes (this is Scotty from the original Star Trek, for those of you ranking below me on the nerd-o-meter) along with some of the remains of nearly 200 others. They lost contact with the vessel after the first separation stage, at which point their engineers believe residual thrust in the detached section caused it to rear-end the second stage of the craft. But this time, they sent the Falcon 1 up with a dummy payload, and achieved orbit without a problem.
My question here was: "Who was funding this?" I assumed it would be a group of investors, but couldn't imagine who they would be. Turns out, it's the guy who created PayPal. Apparently, he sold PayPal to eBay.com for $1.5 billion, which I suppose is more than enough money to, excuse the pun, get his company off the ground. So now we have the potential to actually get commertial flights in orbit in the future, provided the future holds a lithium-ion battery big enough to replace the damn rocket fuel, because by the time we get to the point where this might help, or even be available, it'll be too expensive to use.
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