Mark Whittington (and former Congressman Walker) will disagree, but Jeff Foust has a good piece at the Space Policy Review that explains why it won’t happen, and more importantly, why that’s A Good Thing. I think he’s got it pretty close to right.

A desire for a race with a China that’s simply recapitulating Russian hardware is nostalgia for the sixties and Apollo, and that’s a mindset that we have to break ourselves out of, instead focusing on commerce and lower cost of access. If we ever actually develop an American, free-enterprise space industry, we’ll leave all of the command economies (including NASA) in the dust.

On a related note, Laughing Wolf has a good post on why many space entrepreneurs fail, and why we seem to have made so little commercial progress to date. It’s a lot more fun to draw pictures of rockets than it is to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out markets and drawing up realistic business plans that a non-insane investor will fund. This was a perennial kvetch of the late G. Harry Stine (who used to harangue the attendees of the Space Access Conference on this subject every year).

Fortunately, I think that’s changing. I’ve tried to pick up the lecture where he lamentably left off, and I think that it’s finally sinking in, because we did see some serious companies with serious proposals, starting to raise serious money this year.

I’m very optimistic about this industry right now. We’re not going to get to orbit overnight, but some interesting things are going to happen in the next couple years that I think will have dramatic effects on both the quality of business plans, and the receptiveness of investors toward them. And it will ultimately get us into orbit much faster than any number of NASA programs (from which the prospects of the latter are, in my opinion, null).