You could be forgiven for thinking that everyone but you is going into space. You could also be forgiven for thinking that no one at all is going into space. Both things, in many ways, are entirely true. NASA’s manned space program—not to put too fine a point on it—is a mess. Never mind falling short of the glory of the old Apollo days. We’re not even capable of doing what we did back in the Mercury days—in the early 1960s, when we were sending people up in one-person cans for as little as 15 minutes at a time. At least then we had some kind of human access to space. Now, post-shuttle, the only way we can get to orbit to visit the International Space Station (which we assembled and largely paid for, never mind its International name) is by thumbing a ride aboard Russia’s Soyuz, for which we pay a low-low-low $70 million per seat. And the Soyuz ships are not much to brag about either. Russia’s been flying pretty much the same machine for 50 years and while it does the job, you can forget about going anywhere but low Earth orbit.
But then there are all the new players—Elon Musk and his Dragon spacecraft; Richard Branson and his SpaceShipTwo; Paul Allen and his Stratolauncher; Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin; Sierra Nevada and its Dream Chaser. Oh and there’s that slightly larger outfit known as The People’s Republic of China, which it taking on space the way it’s taken on pretty much everything else it’s turned its attention to in the past 15 years—and that means bigger, better and more ambitiously than anyone else on the block. Just this week, Branson gathered 300 of his citizen astronauts—folks who have already plunked down deposits for $250,000 suborbital rides set to begin as early as 2014—for a sort of pep rally in a hangar in the Mojave desert, with SpaceShipTwo gleaming on the tarmac nearby. The atmosphere was celebratory and the prospective passengers seemed ready to go that very day. But will they be going at all—next year, the year after that or even later? And what about all the other players, big and small, in what has become nothing short of a cosmic scrum? Here’s a look at where they all stand, in rough sequential order—with special emphasis on the rough. In the 21st century space game, things change fast.
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