Outsourcing Space Travel

Looks like a promising trend- the space shuttle was cool, but poorly conceived from a cost-benefit standpoint.
The fact that we can pay to Russians a mere $15million per seat to hitch a ride to the space station shows how far out of whack the costs of operating the space shuttle were.
---------------------------------------------------

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Space Exploration Technologies successfully test fired its Falcon 9 rocket this weekend, clearing a milestone toward the inaugural flight of a privately developed spaceship to fly cargo, and possibly astronauts, into orbit, the company said.
Saturday's 3.5-second 'static' firing of the Falcon's nine kerosene and liquid oxygen-burning motors took place on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It followed an earlier firing test aborted last week due to an improperly configured valve....
...
SpaceX, owned and operated by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, already holds NASA contracts worth nearly $1.9 billion to develop and fly Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules for space station cargo resupply missions.
Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp has NASA contracts of similar value for its Taurus II-Cygnus system, which is scheduled to debut next year.
SpaceX says it needs about three years to develop a launch escape system for Dragon and other upgrades to have Falcon 9 ready for passenger service....



http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100314/sc_nm/us_space_business