Private space truckers

NPR:

With a growing budget deficit, there's not much appetite in Washington to increase NASA's funding. So some of what the agency does now, such as shipping cargo to the space station, will almost certainly be picked up by private companies.

Bretton Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, tells NPR's Guy Raz that companies are already preparing to take over low-Earth orbital services such as space trucking.

"Private companies are building both rockets and the capsules that go on top of them to ferry the cargo from orbit up to the space station," Alexander says. "Those rockets are being built and tested."

And just in time, too. Alexander says a report recently released from the Human Spaceflight Plans Committee says the time is right for commercial companies to step in. He adds that the report expresses confidence that commercial industries have the capability to perform these functions safely.

Privatizing space services would be cheaper in the long run for a couple of reasons, Alexander says. For one, "you can make the argument that the commercial industry might do it cheaper than the government would."

"The second reason, though, is that NASA —- what they're building now —- is focused on exploration," he says. "It's a much more capable system. To get to the space station and back, you really need a simpler system. And if the commercial industry focus is only on that simple system, then it can be done more cost-effectively and faster than the big system that's necessary to go beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon, or to asteroids, or to Mars."

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This is the direction that space activity should evolve. Lets hope it is more profitable than airlines and the freight business. It is likely that it will be more cost efficient that government operations.