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Today marks the 39th anniversary of the historic landing of Apollo 11 on the moon.

Everybody remembers what Neil Armstrong said as he set his booted feet on the dusty lunar surface:

“That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Relatively few people recall, however, the first words actually spoken from the moon.

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin rode down from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface in the lander they had dubbed Eagle while astronaut Mike Collins “held the fort” in the orbiting Apollo 11 crew module. Seconds before the Eagle was to land, Armstrong realized that their chosen landing site was strewn with boulders that could have wrecked the spacecraft.

At the very last moment, Armstrong jinked the Eagle over to a smoother spot, then put the craft down for a safe landing on the Sea of Tranquility.

That’s when he called back to Texas, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” And the NASA controllers at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, who watched the last-second maneuvering, replied, “We copy you, Eagle. You got a bunch of guys turning blue down here.” The point is, 39 years later the Apollo program looks as if it was easy. It wasn’t. None of it. It took skill and guts and brains to get us to the moon within seven years of President Kennedy’s announcement of that goal. Men died to get the job done.

So where are we today?

Thanks to the Apollo program, the United States developed the technology and trained personnel that has allowed us to visit every planet in the solar system with robotic spacecraft.

At this moment there are several craft orbiting Mars, two rovers trundling across its red sands and the Phoenix lander analyzing the ice deposits it found in the north polar region of Mars. NASA has sent spacecraft to study Jupiter and beautifully ringed Saturn. Spacecraft have landed on asteroids and comets, and even Saturn’s giant moon Titan.

Robotic craft have studied Venus and Mercury, flown by Uranus and Neptune. Another is on its way to Pluto, demoted by the astronomers to a “minor planet,” but interesting just the same.

A bevy of telescopes and other observational instruments have been placed in space to study the stars and galaxies. Astronomy has gained more knowledge in the past 40 years than it did in the previous 400.

Human space flight has been limited to Earth orbit since Apollo. We have helped to build and man the international space station. President Bush has started a Space Exploration Initiative, which aims to bring humans back to the moon by 2020, build permanent bases there and eventually send human explorers to Mars.

Although the news media make it sound as if space exploration is the most expensive program in the whole government, the fact is that all the money NASA has been given since the agency’s inception in 1958 doesn’t add up to one year’s expenditure by the Department of Defense or the Department of Health and Human Services.

In return for that investment of tax dollars, space technology has poured trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy in areas such as electronics and computers, aircraft, medical sensors, communications, new fabrics and materials, and many other industries. In balance, space development has been the biggest bargain for the American taxpayer since the Louisiana Purchase.

But where do we go from here?

Since NASA’s inception in 1958, virtually all our efforts in space have been done by the government. The major exception is communications satellites, which have been a trillion-dollar global market since the 1960s.

That situation is changing. A handful of private companies are working to develop rocket launchers that can carry people and payloads into space much more economically than NASA’s space shuttle, which is slated for retirement in another decade or less.

Most of these private companies will undoubtedly fail. But the few that succeed will become the Boeings and Microsofts of the future.

One of the major markets these private companies see is tourism, carrying people into space for the thrill of it. Another is running a ferry service to and from the international space station. NASA is expected to use private transportation companies to supply the ISS after the shuttle is retired.

Of course, a rocket vehicle that can economically carry tourists into orbit and scientists to the ISS can also become a hypersonic ship that can fly people from any spot on Earth to any other spot in an hour or less. That is a market that’s worth trillions, the first major advance in air travel since propeller planes were replaced by jet airliners.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently wrote about the future of space developments in Aviation Week & Space Technology, the weekly newsmagazine of the aerospace industry. Whatever you think of Gingrich’s politics, he is a bright fellow and offers much more insight than the typical politician’s partisan posturing.

Gingrich suggests that the federal government encourage private space developers with strong economic incentives. “We can do this,” he writes, “by creating a 25-year tax-free window for any profits from space tourism and space manufacturing.

“We should also permit 100 percent expensing of all investments in private space developments so they can be written off in one year.” Gingrich also backs offering prizes for new developments, such as the Ansari X-prize that helped prod Burt Rutan’s SpaceShip One, and encouraged Richard Branson to invest in Virgin Galactic, which is offering tourists rides into suborbital space.

Returning to the moon and aiming at human exploration of Mars will stimulate new technology and bright, motivated people, just as Apollo did nearly 40 years ago.

Economic incentives to the new private space transportation companies will help grow a new industry that will make space accessible — and profitable — to us all.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books. His latest is “Laugh Lines,” a collection of humorous science fiction stories. Dr. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com