SpaceX ISS Dragon resupply mission is today
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Planetary Resources excites me for similar reasons. Though I don't think they have quite the same degree of talent at the top in a single guy as with the case of SpaceX. But still, very promising team, vision and approach.
Aren't they planning one way trips ?
The problem with government funded programs is they are underfunded, limited in scope and often have no competition that would push them forward. One of the reasons why Apollo programs were so successful is because Americans and Russians were trying to out do each others and that created a healthy environment for amazing new tech to emerge. The problem today is that no country really cares about space exploration anymore... at least not to the extent they used to.
When you allow free market forces and commercial competition to do their thing, you end up with all sorts of great things that otherwise never would've been. Can all of you imagine where we would be right now if everything computer related was ever researched and invented solely by governmental research programs? Probably somewhere in the 80s/90s, tech wise. If it weren't for Apple and Google trying to make as much money as possible in the phone market, we'd still likely be stuck with black and white phones with mechanical keypads. Same thing is about to happen with space programs. It's the capitalism, competition and free markets that allow for great inventions to emerge. Human greed CAN be a good thing.
Access to space never was about access to space to begin with, it was a showdown on the world political stage.
Congress certainly isn't above putting these kinds of restrictions on COTS project funding. If they can't, then they'll just zero out the COTS funding and fund everything through traditional cost+ projects. The biggest hole in the the thinking of space enthusiasts is the gap between their perception of space projects and How Things Work politically. To me and you it's all about science and fancy engineering and, you know, going where no man has gone before.
To Congress these projects are just a way to bring jobs to the district and get campaign contributions flowing. That's where their consideration ends. They don't even care if anything actually works as long as the jobs are there. That's why Constellation is still alive, and why NASA has ten different campuses. That's why it took twenty years longer than it should have to kill the space shuttle. Hell, that's why mission control is in Houston instead of Florida.
SpaceX will not be immune from the laws of political gravity. The only way they're going to be able to stay relatively efficient is to stick with the commercial market. But Elon Musk seems fixated on Mars, so I doubt that's how things will play out.
Now let's look at SpaceX's Falcon/Dragon. SpaceX financed, designed, and proved the Falcon-9 launch vehicle on its own. To its own specs. To its own design. And to its own internal budget. Similarly, SpaceX began designing the Dragon pressurized spacecraft on its own. NASA came along and offered up the potential for a contract for resupply of the ISS, they did not specify the design or method of construction of the launch vehicle and spacecraft to achieve this goal, nor did they fund the complete development costs of such a system. Instead, SpaceX stepped up and said "hey, we have something that we think could fit your needs" (as did Orbital Sciences Corp.) and then NASA provided some moderate funding to help with specialized development costs for ISS resupply and then extended the opportunity for ISS resupply contracts after a successful demonstration. This is comparable to buying a plane ticket.
SpaceX's NASA contracts are quite lucrative for them (because they can provide a service at a lower price than the competition but it is a very highly priced service) but even without them they are poised to reap massive profits from bog-standard commercial launch services. They have a contract with Orbcomm to launch 18 satellites, and contracts with MDA Corp., SES, Thaicom, NSPO, Asiasat, SS/Loral, Argentina, Israel, and others to launch commercial satellites over the coming years. Because SpaceX is able to set the retail price of its launches at the current market floor (somewhere around the per kg price of the Long March, Soyuz, or Proton) despite their underlying costs being much lower they are able to pocket a healthy profit per launch, which should fatten their wallets mightily even over the next few years let alone the next decade or so.
Then once they pay off investors this way, we'll start seeing even more cost reduction.
There's nothing revolutionary about the Falcon series in the sense that there are special gizmos hidden from potential competitors. If necessary the other players on the market will simply copy them.
This is a common misunderstanding of launch vehicle design. There has long been the idea that "spaceflight is hard", that launch vehicles are inherently expensive, that the only way to progress is through revolutionary, bleeding-edge designs (aerospike engines, SSTO, composite fuel tanks, SCRAMJETs, what-have-you) or "special gizmos" that provide some sort of edge. This turns out to be exactly opposite from reality. The important thing is to have a clean, elegant, robust design which is streamlined for manufacturing. And that's what SpaceX has done. At its heart the Falcon 9 is basically a 6 decade old rocket design. Two stages, LOX/Kerosene. In some ways the Saturn-IB (first launched in 1966) was more advanced because it used a LOX/LH2 2nd stage. But SpaceX has concentrated on streamlining production and on making the rocket very robust (through greater damage tolerance in the engines, the ability to do on-pad aborts, etc.)
And it's this concentration on manufacturing and on robustness that has led to SpaceX's low costs. This isn't something that you can simply bolt-on to an existing rocket design (such as Soyuz, Proton, Long March, etc.) It's a property of the organization, and of the entire rocket design as a whole. And it's also not something that is easy to copy because as much as anything it's about corporate culture and institutional policies and talent.
I'd like to see more companies follow in SpaceX's footsteps but this is something that I think it's unlikely the established rocket makers will be able to do (because it would mean fundamentally reinventing themselves from the bottom up), but I do think it's possible that new companies will come on the scene that are able to match that level of pragmatism and efficiency.
The problem is they're in the same position AOL was in when people started to get high speed internet. There's no way they can make a cheaper rocket without gutting their own high-margin government business, so they'll pretend as long as they can.
I really hope this goes well. The Falcon 9 is still a pretty new rocket, and the Dragon is still a pretty new capsule. Give me five more good launches and I'll be able to watch without holding my breath.
Until they put people in them. And then the breath-holding starts all over.