One of the greatest things about the technology industry is that it can generate an absolutely obscene amount of money for the right person with the right idea at the right time. We all remember the heady days of the original tech bubble in the late 1990s (some of us painfully so), but only now are we really able to see some of the end results.

My case in point on this one is the handful of people who got rich off the '90s tech boom. I mean really rich, like the "I make your annual salary while I'm sitting on the can for a minute and a half" type of rich. I think one of the greatest by-products from the old tech bubble has been the massive injection of money and free time it has given to a few people. The best example out there? If you ask me, it's Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and his newest project -- taking you to outer space and back.

Project Blue Origin is the code name for Bezos' entry into one of the most ambitious and incredible projects undertaken by modern science -- the commercialization of space flight. You may have already seen the Spaceship I concept that actually won the $10 million prize for the first commercial space vehicle to actually work, but Bezos' concept is so creative and so distinctly out of this world that it definitely warranted a blog post this afternoon.

As Bezos puts it "Our first objective is developing New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space." How great does that sound? And wait until you see the actual New Shepard space vehicle! It looks straight out of a 1950s Ed Wood movie, except that there is no visible string dangling from the top of the screen -- this baby works!

Skip on over to their Web site and have a look at some of the pictures and streaming videos that Bezos himself was kind enough to post. Watching that thing take off, hover, and then set down like it's nothing sends chills down my spine. We're close, people. We are very very close to what seemed like science fiction only years ago. Since governments have taken their foot off the gas in the space race, it is now up to the private sector to step up and turn fantasy into a reality.

I guess that is part and parcel of the technology world. We take stuff out of people's dreams and fantasies and make it a reality. I remember as a kid thinking that video phones were the definition of the future and I was only born in 1982. Now we're not only talking on video cell phones, we're downloading "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas and using it as a ringtone to irritate the living hell out of the general populace. That isn't even useful, but people will pay for it, and if people are going to pay for it, somebody's going to provide it. Is a 20 minute trip to outer space useful? Not really. But people will pay for it. Whether it's a trip to space or a 99 cent ringtone of a terrible song, the tech industry will keep pushing things forward because it simply doesn't know how to stop.

The tech industry is kind of like a great white shark. When it comes close to the people, everybody takes notice, It's got plenty of suckers clinging onto the bottom and if the shark stops moving, it dies. Just like the tech industry will die if it stops moving forward. If the commercial space race is the next niche industry where money will be made, simple market economics will make sure that it happens. That's what it all boils down to -- market economics. Just ask the Black Eyed Peas.

Or Jeff Bezos, for that matter.

Andrew Rideout