Today was truly a historic day. In case you haven't heard, today Scaled Composites launched the first private manned mission to space, bringing them one step closer to the Ansari X Prize.

I was excited to watch the live webcasts from the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne launch this morning, and logged on as SpaceShipOne rocketed into space.

The BBC webcast I watched was pretty ordinary, but I did get to see the landing and saw SpaceShipOne towed back from the end of the runway. I also managed to catch a bit of the coverage on FOX News on cable and saw some of the highlights.

This article at CNN.com has all the details, and there are also some great photos of the whole thing (found via BoingBoing.net).

Things like this really bring me hope that space technology developed by private enterprise will lead to a new era in manned spaceflight, after what has essentially been a stagnant field over the past twenty years.

It'll be interesting to see if events like this have a ripple effect on the various government space programs out there...