Scaled Composites has been testing out the flight hardware for their X prize contender. Spaceship One's second flight last month, testing out the "feathered" wing mode, stall speeds, and similarity to simulation, was a success.

Other X prize teams are in the running, and other private space companies are seeking to go into orbit or beyond within a very few years. December 17, 2003 is the centennial of the first powered manned flight, and it looks like the Spaceship One team may make that deadline for the first suborbital flight.

{Spaceship One (and its lifter body, the White Knight) cost $30 million to develop (what NASA spends every twelve hours) and it will cost $80000 for a suborbital flight: 1/1000 of what it cost to send Alan Shepherd to suborbital space.}

So it looks likely that a private company will win the X prize this December. Then it (and other companies who won't be far behind) will start offering trips to suborbital space. The logical next step is for private firms to begin orbital launchs. Each of the X prize contenders is using its own unique method to get into space, and given the enormous difference in cost between Scaled Composite's method and the US government method, expect private companies to dramatically reduce the cost of launching people to orbit.

NASA is in its death throes right now. The space shuttles will be retired in 2010. Every year one space shuttle replacement program is started, and every other year a program is cancelled after having frittered away billions of dollars.

If NASA continues to go at the rate it is going, by 2010 it will have: sucked another 105 billion dollars from the US economy; at least one more shuttle accident; an extension on the shuttle program on the (by then) remaining two shuttles; three or four replacement projects that were 70% complete but scrapped; no heavy-lift shuttle replacement; no passenger delivery-and-return shuttle replacement; a still-incomplete International Space Station preparing to be mothballed; a larger budget.

At the rate private companies are going, by 2010 there will be: regularly scheduled commercial suborbital flights; regularly scheduled commercial orbital flights; a private space station; serious plans for lunar bases; a flotilla of robotic craft on their way to explore the asteroid belt.