I’ve griped before about NASA’s lack of funding, and the modern lack of interest in space travel. After all, 40 years ago we went to the moon, but we haven’t been back since the 70s and we haven’t made any serious headway since then. Sure, we’ve improved on space travel enormously and have sent unmanned probes to just about every object in our solar system larger than the Moon, but we haven’t sent any people to them. No human being has gone farther than the moon, and we haven’t even been back there in decades. Not even to visit.

This is a serious problem and is the evidence for a significant lack of foresight on behalf of the government. Resources are perilously finite on Earth, and with our exploding population size it’s only a matter of time before we run out of everything. The only real option we have is to spread outwards into space and colonize other celestial bodies, but that’s a bit hard to do if the space program receives only 0.05 percent of the national budget.

Thankfully, in recent years especially, private corporations are stepping up to the plate to fill in and provide the scientific breakthroughs we so desperately need.

Elon Musk’s ambitious company SpaceX is always on the tip of everybody’s tongue when private space travel is mentioned, but they aren’t the only organization literally shooting for the stars. Recently, Blue Origin, a competitor company owned by the CEO of Amazon, has made some remarkable headway into reusable rockets.

One of the biggest expenses of space travel are the rockets themselves, which almost never leave the Earth’s atmosphere. They go up, carrying their payload with them, and then blow up or burn out when they fall back to the surface. This is remarkably inefficient, but Blue Origin is working to fix that problem.

Recently, they managed to create a rocket and reuse it not once, but twice after its maiden voyage. This rocket flies up close to the edge of the atmosphere, ejects a probe into near-space, and then descends back to earth and touches ground safely on a landing pad.

This is a big deal, as it’s pretty much the first time anybody’s managed it, but it’s not the only recent innovation in terms of making space technology more efficient and much less expensive. A Spanish company known as Zero2Infinity has recently unveiled its plans to use enormous weather balloons to lift rockets into the high atmosphere before launching them, which will greatly cut down on the amount of fuel they need to use to escape Earth’s gravity and fight the friction of the atmosphere.

Away from the technological aspects and closer to the financial side, there’s even more hope for the future of space travel. Congress recently passed a bill allotting an extra $19.5 billion to NASA, essentially more than doubling their budget for this year. But it comes with an addendum- this money, in its entirety, is to be used solely to further a manned mission to Mars.

Things are looking up in the world of space exploration. If things continue this way, it’s only a matter of time until we all have time shares on Olympus Mons.