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EADS-Astrium/AirBus (they are going through a reorganization at the moment) is arguably a major contender for private commercial spaceflight launch as well. RKK Energia (the company who makes the Soyuz rockets) is also a private company who is competitive with the launch costs of both SpaceX and Orbital. You can debate if they really are a private companies or not (they do have shareholders and private investors... but also governments as investors as well).

Richard Branson has said he has his sights upon orbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, and there is also Stratolaunch, but those are the only other companies I can see being real competition. I had high hopes for ARCA, the Romanian space group that is doing some interesting things, but their projects seem to take even longer to happen than I thought. I'm sort of pleasantly surprised they are still doing stuff. Another group to watch is Copenhagen Suborbitals, who is building flying hardware (they have sent aloft more than a couple missions) and have technology that could at least theoretically make the trip into orbit over time.

Sketchbooks for the project http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/sketchbooks.php

No, I think he has a reasonable chance of living through his attempt as you put it. You may note that the "Personnel" section of their web site does not list any "Astronaut" and their Mission Statement says in the 2nd paragraph:

Our mission is to launch human beings into space on privately build rockets and spacecrafts.

So for all we know there's a skid row somewhere in DK whose inhabitants will soon be riding high with promises of "lots of beer" onboard.

No, I think he has a reasonable chance of living through his attempt as you put it. You may note that the "Personnel" section of their web site does not list any "Astronaut" and their Mission Statement says in the 2nd paragraph:

Our mission is to launch human beings into space on privately build rockets and spacecrafts.

So for all we know there's a skid row somewhere in DK whose inhabitants will soon be riding high with promises of "lots of beer" onboard.

OK, I'll make allowances for poor English. Their web site is actually pretty cool. Still remind me a bit too much of guys who like blowing stuff up for fun, and I'm not entirely convinced by "We have no administration or technical boards to approve our work, so we move very fast from idea to construction. Everything we build is tested until we believe it will do. Then we (attempt to) fly it!"

Yup, they do a have a web site. I guess what with the big Facebook outage the Slashdot eds couldn't track it down.

A suborbital mission would do the trick. Maybe Copenhagen Suborbitals could earn money that way in the future?

What Tyson also said was, that he didn't think the private sector would do trailblazing space feats, it is way too expensive to do space exploration compared to the economic gains that there simply isn't a business case.

This may be much closer to what Neil deGrasse Tyson actually said, but even that is still not proven in terms of historical examples. Completely private funds paid for the first successful experiments in aviation, and arguable it was private investors who paid for the first trips to Antarctica (they were whaling ships... where American whalers where on shore doing repairs when a British "voyage of discovery" sailed by for the first "official" record of that continent). Private investors also dump huge amounts of money into automotive research.... usually through investments in Formula-1 and NASCAR vehicles as well as other similar efforts. Bell Labs was famous for a nearly constant stream of innovations including many things that make it possible to read these very words.

To say that private individuals won't be trailblazing in space is mainly to note that for a great many years it was actually illegal for private individuals to even try, not to mention that so much money has been dumped into government programs that for the moment it is impossible for private individuals to compete. Robert Goddard and other contemporary experimenters did, however, use private funds to significantly develop their projects at the beginning of rocket development. There are also companies like Copenhagen Suborbitals who are refining the technology on their own without any government backing in their own private attempts to get into space. It isn't like the Danish Space Agency is competing too hard trying to do the same thing.

I'll admit that without government funding of space exploration, it would perhaps take a bit more time for people to build up both the nerve and the financial resources necessary to be able to go into space. On top of that, things done in space would mostly have to turn a profit eventually (even if it is only a very long term objective) for private efforts to be successful. That is happening in other areas too where private commercial spaceflight is finally beginning to be successful beyond GEO satellites and telecom efforts (two huge areas where commercial spaceflight is already very well established). I disagree that it would never be done, but things accomplished would definitely have different priorities when done by commercial entities as opposed to government agencies. A business case can be made for travel into space for a number of things, so I also disagree with the concern that economic gains can't be made.

Exactly.

Kristan Von Bengtson is the co-founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, an amateure rocket group, that as its first goal are going to send a man 100 km up. Though they admittedly are a delightfully whacky, there's no scam.

See e.g. their launch of a guided rocket, test of their liquid engine (which went CATO during the test) or one of the many other videos available.

Be careful how you change the laws. Copenhagen Suborbitals has the sea launch platform Sputnik. That exists exactly because small ships without passengers face little regulation. Obviously changing US laws will not cause trouble for Sputnik, so in that way the example is contrived, but it would likely have been quite a hassle for Copenhagen Suborbitals to get the vessel approved. It is not exactly a typical ship, so the paperwork could end up quite substantial.

I have every reason to believe that Sputnik is safe to use, and the various crew seem to be safety-conscious to the point of being borderline paranoid. It would be a shame if red tape stopped a similar group of people in the US from making something spectacular.

I think the total size of the economy is more important in attempting to measure a country's ability to maintain a national space program. Otherwise some small but rich European or oil-producing country would have also launched humans into space a long time ago. The Soviet Union was clearly poorer than the US in per capita terms, but managed to beat the US to several early space milestones.

I suppose that is where these crazy nerds come along and try to prove your notion could work all along. I'll admit their goal is more to duplicate Alan Shepard's flight rather than John Glenn's, but it is none the less showing that more countries and people are coming together and trying to get into space.

Russia might get a little nervous if Denmark starts to attempt orbital spaceflight though. These guys are using a launch site in the Baltic Sea, and extra nerd points are earned because the "ground crew" for the launch site works out of a submarine on launch day.

If you try to do it with the US, it would never happen. Just ask the Europeans. It's not like they're on great relations with the Russians, the only other country that can put humans into space.

So you're left with the Iranians, North Koreans and a couple of crazy amateur in Denmark.

Sounds like solo is the best approach.

The question to answer that question is, will it cost billions of dollars? Copenhagen Suborbitals are proving* that space travel can be a hobbyist project. Granted, there is a long way from suborbital to the moon, but just getting where they are now would have been called impossible twenty years ago.

Another point is that hacker space activity usually is more about the process than the goal. So what if they never put a man on the moon, if they put one in LEO and have fun on the way, that's a win.

*Pending their actual succes, and assuming the capsule will not burn on reentry.

If you want to support non-profit space flight, give these guys a donation: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

While this may seem a bit far fetched, there is a precedent for a small but determined group of people who I think will eventually be able to get some vehicles above the Kármán line and perhaps even eventually into orbital spaceflight. While not mentioned in the article, these groups have been able to do some impressive things.

The groups I'd compare to this effort include:

• Armadillo Aerospace - a couple of Texans with big dreams and a comparatively small budget (compared to NASA)
• Copenhagen Suborbitals - a bunch of crazy Danes who can't keep still. BTW, check out their submarine they built earlier... gives a whole new meaning to a ballistic missile submarine.
• ARCA - The European continent holds more than a few nut groups. These are the Romanians who have really gone out on a limb to redefine what spaceflight even means.
• Unreasonable Rocket - Just when you've seen it all, along comes a group who does even more with less. And these guys are from California.

My point here is that a small group with limited finances can put stuff together if they care, provided that they make the effort, experiment a whole bunch, and keep working at the issues. The nice thing about all of the above groups is that they've been around for a few years, seem to be pretty stable, and have all flown vehicles of various kinds to prove they are legitimate. These are not groups with pretty power point presentations, but rather folks that have more than a couple smoking craters from experiments gone bad as well as some amazing success stories too. I expect every one of these groups to be above the Kármán line within this next decade, and quite possibly one or two of them could achieve orbit in the next 20-40 years if they stay persistent with their business plans.

I certainly see nothing special about these groups, and it is entirely possible that a group in Uganda could join their ranks in their quest to build a cheap but quality rocket. There are some amazing resources to draw upon as well as a whole bunch of experience. Besides, Uganda doesn't have to deal with ITAR restrictions, so there may even be an advantage for them over some of their competitors.

Has anyone else taken a closer look at this though?

Yes, these guys. They just launched a test rocket on June 3rd this year.

It's possible for monopolies to exist without government intervention.

- without gov't intervention no monopoly can exist, and if there is some dominant business, it's domination is totally temporary.

. Perhaps the business in question is a risky endeavor that no one but a select few wish to take up.

- what does that even mean? Every business is a risky endeavor that only very few are willing to take up. Case in point is private space launches, what can be more risky and time/resource consuming that that? Well, there are things, but this is definitely one of them:

http://www.space.com/11298-spacex-rocket-private-spaceflight-falcon9.html

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home

Perhaps very few people have the money to provide competition towards an already established business

- this wasn't a problem in the beginning of 20th century, before the Fed started printing all that money and IRS started taking people's incomes away, so there were hundreds, even thousands of competitors in phone business, dozens in electrical power generation AND transmission. Of-course this happened before some businesses in those industries started colluding with the government to get monopoly statuses. Same with pharma and medical profession, which always were private enterprises but eventually became monopolies due to government involvement.

Perhaps the majority help create a monopoly themselves by not shopping elsewhere enough

- that's called demand, if one company provides a solution that is so cost effective and provides so much value, that most people do not bother looking for alternatives, then for a while this business will dominate, but the competition arises anyway, just like with the phone and electrical companies that I mentioned. Those are tough businesses, especially due to name recognition, and still the monopolies there only formed after government intervention.

And without regulation, how would anyone stop companies that cooperate with one another (which could happen if they would receive more money by doing so)?

- nobody wants to share their pie with somebody else, who may or may not succeed being a competitor.

If you have a business and I come over and tell you: I am going to take over your market share because I am going to build a business better than yours. So you think you'd just start paying me money only so that I wouldn't do it? How many people would you be willing to support this way, because that's what this amounts to. No no, what you do is you laugh me out of your office and tell me to go do it if I can, and then you concentrate more on your market share because I promised to take it away.

Cartels do not work, it's clear with oil cartels - they don't work. It's because there is no upside for you to keep your promise to only meet your quota at some preset price and not to sell more and not to sell more at lower price, because clearly, if you have to collude with others in your cartel, then the prices are artificially set, and in reality (IRL) you make more money by having more customers who buy more of your product, not by setting artificial barriers to your customers by raising prices too high.

Businesses know that it's better to have as much market penetration as possible, you do this by providing product as cheaply and at highest quality that can, that way you get the most market penetration. The only time cartels work is when government is standing there with a gun - just like in case of big pharma and FDA.

At least link the guys that made it happen.

Support the Copenhagen Suborbitals. I'm sure there are other groups somewhere trying the same type of thing, but they're the only ones about which I know.

The price has really come down, we aren't talking about putting a shuttle up there.

On the list of crazy, there are better entries. http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/index.php

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

These guys are doing some thing almost as cool though sticking to purely amateur ideals. Luckily for science loving people they've gotten a lot of press coverage. Unfortunately their latest launch failed on the pad, due to an issue with power, and they wont be able to attempt another test for six months odd. Still it is great to see people attempting to move past the generic rocket club stuff people have been doing pre-fab for 40 years.

They definitely, along with some other examples, inspired me to push my friends to start doing serious engineering projects for fun. So far our list of things to attempt comes from any thing cool on TV that come with the stupid warning 'don't try this at home!'.

If you gonna do it, do it in style. Die in a homebuild rocket dragged behind a homebuild submarine.

Absolutely hilarious. This line had me lolling all over the place.

If you gonna do it, do it in style. Die in a homebuild rocket dragged behind a homebuild submarine.

Damn, that riding position reminds me of being stuck in an MRI machine. Between the that cramped arms at your side position to the openness of the canopy around your head its going to take someone with extreme mental fortitude to take the ride.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/spacecraft.php

Check out the spacecraft: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/spacecraft.php

Sven the crash test dummy is in for a wild ride!

The pace at which they've managed to do this work is phenomenal.

I agree. Why should you have to pay tax dollars on this?

But at the same time, why should you prevent me through silly regulations (hint, ITAR... look it up if you like) and government policies that explicitly keep me from experimenting with or even attempting to build rockets on my own dime. The question isn't that somebody like you needs to be able to pay for me to go into space, but rather that there are people (perhaps you aren't one of them) that explicitly want to keep me down on this rock at gunpoint and will sabotage any efforts I make in regards to getting off of this rock.

Organizations like NASA are quickly becoming a relic of the past, where the money is merely a way to have a bunch of bureaucrats spin their wheels and keep some disenchanted aerospace engineers and munitions workers busy when a war isn't going on. I certainly wouldn't cry too hard if NASA was completely de-funded and disbanded by Congress.... as if they have been making any sort of relevant progress towards cost-effective spaceflight at any time over the past 40 years anyway. Doubling the NASA budget is only going to double the number of bureaucrats working in Houston, Texas. It isn't going to get anybody off of this rock in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, there are many different private spaceflight companies with real hardware that can get people into space. We don't need a government agency to get that accomplished. Yes, government grants are nice, but it isn't needed to get this task accomplished.

For myself, if government is going to get involved at all, I'd rather they simply give a "tax holiday" for all federal taxes (corporate and personal income taxes... and other kinds too) by companies directly engaged in putting equipment into space. It would certainly be far and away more cost effective than doubling the current NASA budget, and perhaps something would actually be flying beyond Low-Earth orbit too. I definitely think that such a move would cause private space investment to roar into life in a manner that has never been seen before. The loss in taxes would be minor, and I could argue that the taxes raised from support industries would by far and away more than make up for any "lost" tax receipts to such companies.... and certainly be quite a bit less than going through the appropriations meat-grinder of the U.S. Congress.

Ya know, it seems to be a common occurrence to find space projects with horrid web sites. Consider:

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
http://www.interorbital.com/

Both real groups doing real hardware right now, with websites that look like scams.

Here in Denmark, we have some guys working on a manned space flight: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ "Our mission is very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space. This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor lead by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers." Their progress is impressive!

It's not so much the technical challenges that keep private firms grounded. It's the demand for documentation. Every little bolt of a spacecraft needs to be certified. But if the demand for certification is bypassed, amazing things happen. Take a look one this project created by two danes, who want to send a person into space. http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/index.php They have set a simple goal, they want to launch a manned rocket into space(define as an altitude of 100km+), which will do a zero g parobola before returning to earth. They have already tested their engine design on several scaled models. And so far their rocket design have performed very well. Their project is a non-profit project supported by sponsers and a lot volunteers. Going into space is easy... dealing with the official red tape.... that's another story indeed.