This is what happens when you only hear half the story.

Now, mind you I'm not totally sold on what "The Plan" is. However, it is abundantly clear that Elon Musk and his people at SpaceX are doing more with less than NASA could ever dream of. This disappoints me as I've been a HUGE NASA fan for my entire life.

Elon Musk, in case you don't know, has started his own space program with nothing more than the money he got inventing and selling PayPal. He basically got something more than a billion dollars in that sale. Keep in mind the cost of ONE shuttle flight is estimated at over a billion dollars.

With that money, he's managed to create and build the Dragon family of rockets which have already launched payloads into space for paying customers.

Oh - he also started Tesla Motors, the company that makes the 120MPH electric-only sports car that CA Governor Schwarzenegger lieks so much.

SpaceX won a contract last year - $1.6B for TWELVE supply missions to the International Space Station. That's TWELVE missions for just above the price of one Space Shuttle mission. The contract has options to make it worth as much as $3.1B

So, you say, that's great for cargo, what about humans?

Take a look at the Dragon capsule, which is what will be ferrying cargo to the space station. SpaceX said it was designed to become man-rated. Basically it needs an escape system (think of the needle-looking little rocket on top of the old Saturn V) and (I think) another hatch. All they need is a contract from NASA and they said they'll improve it.

Mind you, that's just SpaceX. A resupply contract was also awarded to Orbital Sciences Corp. This was to make it so that NASA was not totally dependant on any one provider. The only part of this I don't understand is why SpaceX got 1/3 of the total money to provide 2/3 of the number of missions - seems like OSC will be paid more to do less, but that's another matter.

So if this is all so good, why did I say I wasn't totally sold on "The Plan"? Because I'm worried that there will be no follow through.

Bush put forth the grandiose plan of getting back to the moon and on to Mars with the Constellation program. We've apparently spent NINE BILLION dollars developing it and all we have to show for it is the sub-orbital flight of a Not-Really-The-Ares-IX (It didn't have all it's segments, had no proper payload and was, by all accounts, just a show for COngress to see that SOMETHING was happening). We also have SOME mockups of the Orion capsule. Nothing for the Antares lunar lander.

Look at what SpaceX is doing for a fraction of the money.

I'm worried, however, that the administration, like it's predecessor, will not follow through. THey'll keep us in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and go no further until the Chinese land taikonauts on the lunar surface.

This has the potential to be Something Really Big. We could get SO much more bang for our buck and have COMPETITION driving launch costs down to where the moon becomes far more affordable.

I'm pulling for Mr. Musk. Those who hate Big Government and think that the Private Sector can do things better might just find a perfect example here.