As the X Prize teams embark on this new journey of private space exploration, I'd like to take a minute to recognize the fact that several exciting missions are currently being executed by the governmental space agencies. The European Space Agency is still flying the Venus Express spacecraft around our sister planet (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/), JPL continues to stun with images and discovery after scientific discovery in the Saturn system by the Cassini spacecraft (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm), and the Kepler mission (http://kepler.nasa.gov/) has recently announced the discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars, and they're looking in only one small part of the sky!

Near and dear to my heart is NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury (http://messenger.jhuapl.edu). Today (March 17th), after a 6 and 1/2 year journey through the inner solar system, the MESSENGER spacecraft will go into orbit around the solar system's innermost planet. Designed, built and operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland, this mid-sized NASA mission will be the first orbital mission to Mercury and will provide a critical piece to the puzzle of why the rocky planets in our solar system evolved into such different bodies. Follow along with a live webcast (http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/mer_orbit.html) from APL.

As a team member on the MESSENGER mission, I was lucky enough to see development, launch and the excitement of multiple flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself. In my opinion, the X Prize vision of private space exploration could not proceed at the pace we're seeing without the heritage generated by MESSENGER and the many exciting missions across the solar system that have been funded by NASA and governmental space agencies around the world.

Good luck to MESSENGER tomorrow, and good luck to all the X Prize teams who are building on the legacy of over 50 years of space system development!