I think a lot of the American public doesn't realize.. at least truly realize.. that the Space Shuttle program is winding to an end. There are 5 space shuttle flights left and the last one will fly this year. Then, that's it, no more space shuttle.

Its been in the news for almost two years now. But whenever I talk to someone (outside our little space program universe here in Houston), they are extremely surprised and slightly outraged when I tell them...

And then they are woefully and terribly not excited with the response to "what next", which is a large and more technologically advanced Apollo-like capsule called Orion that launches on a new rocket called Ares 1 to the Space Station. After this, there is a more nebulous plan to build another rocket, called Ares 5, to go to the moon.

Going boldly where we've been before, right?

The promising ray of sunshine in this, to me, is that there are a number of space start-ups in a burgeoning space tourism industry. Now, there has always been "commercial" space, with the big names, like Lockheed and Boeing selling launch services. But now these little guys are getting into the mix, though not so little anymore, they are designing vehicles which hold the promise of flying people, even without the gaurantee of government passengers.

It makes you wonder why we even bother spending another billion dollars building a government rocket (still contracted out to private business to build it) when we could just use one of these suppliers.

So the rumor mill is churning that the giant government program behind Ares 1 is going to get canned in favor of private access to space. There are advantages to this approach. But disadvantges, these companies are new and inexperienced, and we would be trusting them to provide our national access to space -- even with the seeming inevitability of an accident that could cripple the industry. But, of course, the government-run space program doesn't exactly have an accident free history either.

Anyway, either way, changes may be ahead, and the rumor mill is churning. We'll see what this means for both the space program and my career...