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We have more than enough beautiful drawings and pie in the sky dreams, these do not advance the end goal of having and regularly using cheap manned access to space.

These guys are not just making beautiful drawings, and I fail to see how they are not advancing the end goal of having regular and cheap crewed access to space.

I don't know what their end goal actually is, assuming they can actually put capsules into space. I think that issue is something which legitimately needs to be brought up. There is a history of some "open source projects" (Gracenote comes to mind) where once a pile of money starts flowing and the project gets on a firm footing financially that the volunteers get left behind in the dust. The Wikimedia Foundation is another such project that isn't quite so bad, but Jimmy Wales definitely could have completely sold out the community in the past and definitely did in some ways too so far as there are some people making a huge pile of money off of Wikipedia content, even if indirectly.

I don't mind the fact that Kristian Von Bengston is dreaming big. We need that in this universe, where people who dream big can actually accomplish things. If he tries and fails, he is but one more person who has definitely been in that situation before. Jim Benson was another such dreamer in commercial spaceflight that tried and failed.... but provided the groundwork for others to follow that really did help. I could name a great many others that can definitely fit in that list, including I might add Werner Von Braun..... who even got his start from Hermann Oberth if you want to follow an interesting engineering pedigree. We won't get into space without folks like this. I'll even say that Kristian Von Bengston is leading a resurgance of private spaceflight for the European Union, which I find awesome in so many ways for just that point too.

And the really amazing thing is that Copenhagen Suborbitals is doing all of this with very minimal amounts of tax dollars involved. There is a sort of libertarian side of me that is just screaming "He gets it!" on that point too. This could be a huge government boondoggle with pork flowing all over the EU as yet another ESA project for going to the Moon or something like that. Instead, it is private money that is paying for the bulk of what is going on, even if it is donations. That by itself is proof of some significant support for spaceflight

He mentioned a few days ago he's putting Armadillo in hibernation until he makes his next million. As CTO, he stands to make a fair amount of cash if things go well.

With Armadillo currently in hibernation, Carmack said he is actively looking for outside investors to restart work on the company’s rockets. “If we don’t wind up landing an investor, it’ll probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” he said. Funding Armadillo, he said, has “always been a negotiation with my wife,” he said, setting aside some “crazy money” to spend on it. “But I’ve basically expended my crazy money on Armadillo, so I don’t expect to see any rockets in the real near future unless we do wind up raising some investment money on it.”

Article

From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:

Mars mission that would fly by Mars, but not go into orbit around the planet or land on it.

Right. Tell your kids: "let's go to McDonalds!" Load them up in the car. Drive to McD's, just drive past it, return home. Let's see how well that goes does for "going to McDonalds".

From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:

This publication obtained a copy of the paper Tito et al. plan to present at the conference, discussing a crewed free-return Mars mission that would fly by Mars, but not go into orbit around the planet or land on it. This 501-day mission would launch in January 2018, using a modified SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. According to the paper, existing environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) technologies would allow such a spacecraft to support two people for the mission, although in Spartan condition. âoeCrew comfort is limited to survival needs only. For example, sponge baths are acceptable, with no need for showers,â the paper states.

The IEEE Aerospace Conference is in March -- next month. That's pretty interesting timing.

Reader FleaPlus contributes related news about NASA's proposed funding for scientific payloads on commercial space flights, which would be a huge boon to researchers.

Well, to be more precise, it's actually the commercial suborbital flights. For the curious, here's the text of my submission the summary is referring to:

Suborbital Science Gets Boost From NASA

This past week NASA announced that it would provide $15M/year for 5 years (pending Congressional approval) for launching science payloads on commercial suborbital spacecraft, which provide a more cost-effective and productive way to perform many types of research. The announcement was made at the first Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, where a few hundred scientists and rocket builders gathered to get a better understanding of each others' needs and capabilities. In addition to space tourism flights, several companies, like John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic, are competing for the lucrative scientific market to fly payloads for fields like microgravity biology/chemistry, atmospheric science, astrophysics, and space technology tests.

...is a friggin' sensationalist claim that has no place in science reporting, either on a primary site or on a news aggregation site. Should the first Falcon 9 fail, they will learn from it and launch better designs in the future. Orbital still is working on its Taurus rocket. The EELV program (Atlas and Delta) are still pushing strong in the commercial market. If the first Falcon 9 flight fails, it will not be the end all be all of either Obama's current NASA vision, nor America's role in the space program. So please, keep the hyperbole out of the damned summaries guys.

I totally agree. I'm a huge fan of SpaceX and have a lot of hope for them, but even if they suddenly disappeared into the ubiquitous ether the new NASA plan would still be going strong. As you mentioned, there's quite a few other companies getting fixed-price milestone-based funding from NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft for crew. A quick summary:

Launch vehicles:
* SpaceX Falcon 9 (vehicle mentioned in summary): medium development risk, low-cost
* Lockheed/ULA Atlas V: low-risk (development risk, that is), high cost, but still drastically lower cost than Space Shuttle or Constellation (has been operating for a number of years now, with all 20 launches so far successful)
* Boeing/ULA Delta IV Heavy: low-risk, high cost (could potentially lift Orion spacecraft)
* Orbital Taurus II: medium-risk, medium-cost, although probably better suited for cargo than crew

Spacecraft (potentially launched on a variety of different launch vehicles):
* SpaceX Dragon: capsule is pretty much ready, with a number of test articles, but the development "long pole" is a to-be-developed launch escape system
* Boeing/Bigelow capsule: sometimes termed the "Orion Lite", Bigelow's also interested in this as a way to get to his private space station modules
* Blue Origin: composite capsule, also designing a novel push-based (instead of the traditional tractor-based) escape system adaptable to other capsules
* Sierra Nevada/SpaceDev Dream Chaser: more novel design, using a lifting-body based on the well-tested HL-20; this sort of design provides a gentler reentry from LEO (and potentially upgrades well to lunar/Lagrangian return); the company has already spent at least $10M of its own funds developing the design and building test articles
* Orbital Cygnus: optimized for cargo deliveries to ISS, but can potentially be extended to crew

It's also worth noting that Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are all being funded on CCDev contracts (in addition to a certain amount of private funding, which they're all required to have). With these contracts, they only get the full payment if they meet all of their pre-determined milestones (building test articles, performing tests, etc.) by September of 2010. IMHO, this September is when we'll get a better idea of which companies will be competing for crew/cargo delivery in the future, and