The private race for space heats up
Seeing this reminder of an impending private space flight (as opposed to a national effort) reminds me that this is a topic I kept meaning to get around to at least noting.
In general I'm excited by these efforts, and I hope that sufficient creativity is shown in helping to make these commercial efforts successful. The downside of a direct commercialization of space efforts is that I lament the potential loss of the push into space as a national effort. Looking back over the Cold War era, there were really only two, truly ennobling efforts to come out of it: The Space Program and the Peace Corps. How much better is it to press funds into such potentially enriching human endeavors than to channel them into international military adventures? I'd hoped for a resumption of a space race each time China logged another milestone (for their nation) in terms of spaceflight in the past few years, and I'm sure it will play some part, but with that nation representing its own brand of capitalism on the rise, we're likely to see a complex brew come out of this.
My expectation is that these private efforts will succeed in the long term, and the most successful of them will become NASA subcontractors. Indeed, they'll likely be responsible for tearing down the unfortunate accumulation of wasteful bureaucracy that's plagued NASAs operations for decades.
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