Aviation Week reports that our President's independent panel in charge of assessing our space programs sees a 9-year gap from the time the Shuttle is retired to the time the Ares rockets are carrying people into space again. The Ares rocket is foundational to NASA's plans to get us to the moon. So here's my rub: NASA may not equates to all of USA Human Spaceflight for much longer.
Bark predicts: private venture companies will (1) offer adventurous tourists access to space, and (2) will sell NASA privately-built spaceships with which to reach the International Space Station (ISS).
Pay heed to the following companies:
This company will probably be the first one to provide (suborbital) access to space. Sir Richard Branson will use a scaled-up version of Scaled Composite's Spaceship One system. Spaceship One won the Ansari X-Prize and now hangs as an artifact of American greatness at our National Air and Space Museum. That achievement was funded largely by Paul Allen who made his fortune as a Microsoft co-founder. Check out a cool Virgin Galactic promo video at metacafe. This is the record-holder for first privately-funded system to put a man in space (but not yet in orbit).
This company successfully launched and inserted two payloads into low earth orbit. They scratch-built a rocket and engines using $300M from Elon Musk who made his fortune by making PayPal and selling it to Ebay for $500M. (He's now CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors.) They have a NASA contract in hand to create a system that will autonomously deliver payload to the International Space Station. To accomplish this they're currently working on a much more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, which would rival any of the offerings from Lockheed Martin or Boeing. As a "side project" of sorts, they're building that rocket to human-rating standards and are exploring human-rating that payload capsule, named Dragon, so that it could carry humans to space, including the ISS. This is the record-holder for first privately-funded system to reach orbit.
This one requires a little history. Back when the International Space Station was being designed, there were two camps of engineers. The first wanted to send large, rigid, finished modules to space. The second wanted to send smaller, inflatable modules to space. The first group won and this is how the Space Station has been constructed to date. Enter one of Las Vegas' billionaire hoteliers, Robert Bigelow. He wants to build earth-orbiting hotels. He cherry picked many of NASA's engineers who were in that second camp: the inflatable modules group. He has launched two (Genesis I and Genesis II) successful scale prototypes into Low Earth Orbit. The group keeps moving forward with larger and larger modules. Eventually one of them will be human habitable. Their next expected launch is scheduled for the year 2011 on (drum roll please) a Falcon 9 rocket.
These are just three of many companies trying to burn through mega-fortunes in a privately funded space race. There are others. There's Rocketplane Kistler founded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame. He wants to build a rocketplane not unlike Virgin Galactic. Armadillo Aerospace founded by John Carmack (he made his fortune with the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake video games). He wants to build a lunar-lander type vehicle.
Notice I am not predicting that private companies will outdo NASA overall. But I do take umbrage with the lingering sentiment that NASA is and will be America's only access to space. Mark my words: we will not experience a "nine-year U.S. spaceflight gap".