Now here's a man after my own heart!

"NASA was so spectacularly successful with the Apollo program, no one ever questioned if the government should be doing space or not," Gump said. "It took until this year -- that many decades -- to actually raise the question: Should our path to space be done with Stalinist central planning or with the traditional American blueprint with innovative, enterprising companies?"

In the '50s the contractions began.  The water broke in the late '60s.  There was a whole lot of pushing in '70s, '80s, and '90s and now, finally the baby Space Age has crowned.
 

"There's been a change in the assumptions about space," David Gump, LunaCorp president and co-founder, told United Press International. "Fifteen years ago it was perceived that only the government can do space -- (that) it was just too expensive for any companies to do it on their own. That assumption has fallen by the wayside and now the question is how should NASA and the private sector interact."

LunaCorp is developing a spacecraft called SuperSat to relay high-resolution, digital video of its voyage from Earth to the moon and create maps of the lunar surface. The company also plans to land a mobile, tele-operated robot on the moon that can be operated by paying visitors at science centers, theme parks and museums.

Gump is positioning LunaCorp to ride NASA's next wave of lunar exploration. He formed a coalition of small firms -- he will not say yet which companies are his partners -- that last week submitted its pitch for a $3 million study contract to design a moon mission for NASA. The agency plans to award five or six contracts, each of which would cover six months of work, with an optional extension for another six months and $3 million.
...
"We're at a new American space age," Rick Tumlinson, founder of the non-profit advocacy group Space Frontier Foundation, told participants at his group's Return to the Moon conference in Las Vegas this past weekend.

Leading the charge into the new frontier, which Tumlinson calls an "alternative space program," are privately developed efforts, such as SpaceShipOne, which last month became the first non-government, manned vehicle to reach space. The vessel was designed by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites, of Mojave, Calif., and financed by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen.
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"When I look at the moon, I see real estate," said Randa Milliron, co-founder of Interorbital Systems of Mojave, Calif., which is developing passenger launch vehicles as well as a lunar hotel.