NASA spurs commercial space industry

I have to look at the space station as another vast government program, in other words with very skeptical eyes. Still, I do like the way it is now going to be fueling the commercial space industry. Note it's the failure of the space shuttle program that is doing this. In fact, most of what the space shuttles have done could have been handled by commercial companies with a greater degree of safety and much more cheaply. From space.com:

NASA has awarded a pair of contracts worth $3.5 billion through 2016 to two private aerospace firms seeking to haul vital supplies to and from the International Space Station, the space agency announced late Tuesday. The Hawthorne, Calif.-based firm Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences Corp., of Dulles, Va., beat a third competitor for NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contracts with their proposals to privately develop and launch spacecraft capable to delivering cargo to the space station and returning supplies back to Earth.