You need only look up to see it, but space—that is, the potentially infinite blackness overhead—is perhaps best experienced by closing one’s eyes. For the moment, there’s not a tremendous amount of distance between the imagination and the relatively few realities we’ve discovered “up there.” Less certain is how our next round of discoveries will be made; the Shuttle program is ending this year, the most recent NASA mission has been scrubbed and a new plan is just now starting to take shape. But we are still making strides, and many of them were little more than dreams themselves just a few years ago.

Commercial flights to space are set to begin in the next couple of years; like something out of a movie, glossy brochures are already touting “emotional” views and the “gracefulness” of zero gravity. On the business side of things, commercial spacelift vehicles are becoming faster, cheaper and safer, meaning more satellites whizzing around, increased global communications, affordable scientific research and improved Super Bowl broadcasts to Vanuatu. And finally, the country itself has recently re-charted its course to the cosmos with a grand vision that might inspire us to reach higher and achieve more than we ever have, or it could just be another expensive tangent in NASA’s roller-coaster mission history.

Politics, individual desires, and commercial needs—considering how much we don’t know about space exploration, it’s all getting awfully complicated. But then there’s a lot at stake: countless financial rewards, untold technological and scientific gains and that Holy Grail of any age of exploration: bragging rights.

We’ve barely started the engine when it comes to discovering our universe, and people all over this small rock are already fighting over who gets to drive, who gets to navigate and who has to ride in the back seat. Barring some huge disaster, we’ll all get there eventually. But 53 years after Sputnik, the quickest path to the stars for most of us is still a moonlight walk and a head full of dreams.

Here’s a quick look at the state of space:

People

To fly among the stars… Countless artists have made a living keeping this dream alive in novels and films, while workers in the space industry have been busy making it come true—for a very select few. In fact, less than 500 people have experienced space travel, but that’s about to change. Moon vacations and space hotels are still fantasies, but private space flight is here, and the most talked-about, publicized and arguably exciting option comes from Richard Branson and VirginGalactic.

At this very moment—that is, right now, today—you can go to VirginGalactic.com and buy a ticket to space. Sure, the ticket costs $200,000, but YOU GET TO GO TO SPACE.

To put that in perspective: In 2007, an Australian man named Julian Hayward paid more than $100,000 for two one-way plane tickets from Singapore to Sydney, Australia—on a plane that maxes out at 677mph and has a ceiling of 43,000 feet. Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo can make Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound, roughly 2,300mph) and climb to 360,000 feet (68 miles), putting all six passengers into a severely quiet, zero-G suborbital flight just inside the thermosphere. It’s not the Space Shuttle’s 600-miles-high view, but the sky outside is black and you’ll be looking down on the atmosphere, getting the “blue planet” experience.

With more than 340 potential passengers already signed up to fly, VirginGalactic is on track to single-handedly double the number of people who’ve had the experience of space flight.

SpaceShipTwo is the creation of aerospace designer Burt Ratan and his Mojave-based Scaled Composites. Ratan made a name for himself when his SpaceShipOne took the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004, becoming the first private, piloted craft to successfully reach an altitude of 62 miles twice in two weeks carrying near 400 pounds in extra weight to simulate passengers. SpaceShipTwo is built of the same carbon composite construction and uses the same basic design as its predecessor, but it’s twice as large—60’ long with a 90” diameter cabin (similar to a Falcon 900 executive jet, but with no floor splitting the cabin because hey, you’ve got to have room to play in zero gravity). Basically an air-launched glider, SpaceShipTwo is carried to near 50,000 feet by Virgin MotherShip Eve, a twin fuselage aircraft that’s an equally impressive bit of engineering, and then launched spaceward.

Another potential player on the commercial RLV (reusable launch vehicle) scene is taking a different approach. XCOR Aerospace, also based at the Mojave Spaceport, is working on the Lynx, which will take off and land like an airplane under its own rocket power. The company says the two-seat piloted transport will eventually be making up to four flights per day, carrying humans and payloads to 330,000 feet on half-hour suborbital flights. XCOR is also selling tickets to ride on its Web site and they’re roughly half the price of VirginGalactic’s—but then a Lynx hasn’t yet flown to space.

There are other options on the drawing board as well. SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies, another company at Mojave Spaceport) is working on Dragon, a free-flying reusable spacecraft that will be able to hold cargo and/or crew members. More of a traditional capsule, Dragon is designed to launch atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. What opportunities it will offer for human experiences are yet to be determined, but this company is closer than most to getting off the ground. As of press time, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was vertical and basically ready to launch at Cape Canaveral.

And there’s still the Russian Space Agency option: a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft for somewhere between $20 and $35 million. The thing is, though, with so many private companies in the game now, governmental space agencies don’t really seem the place for tickets to space anymore. The moment the X Prize was claimed, their future in space flight and the future of the big companies that have supplied them—namely Lockheed Martin and Boeing—was rewritten. Burt Ratan put it best after he accepted the award, telling MSNBC, “I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.’”

Stuff

In the late 1990s, the Space Shuttle was going strong, the X Prize had yet to be claimed, and the key letters in space vehicle development were SSTO—“single stage to orbit.” VentureStar, the Shuttle’s planned successor, was an SSTO, as were a number of other projects on industry drawing boards. The reason SSTO is so important is because things fall off of multi-stage launch vehicles as they climb toward space, and those things need a place to land. Hence, all launch sites had to be near an ocean or large, barren expanse of land. With SSTOs, there’d be nothing falling off, and almost anyone with a sizeable chunk of real estate could build a spaceport. With even the cheapest launches costing near $120 million, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this is big business.

When the VentureStar project was announced, competition for the launch facility was incredible. More than a dozen land-locked communities stepped forward in areas such as West Texas and the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Because VentureStar was so big (too big to piggyback on an airplane like the Shuttle), it had to be launched where it was built, meaning a multi-billion-dollar investment and, effectively, a new town for whatever location won the contract. When VentureStar was canceled, thousands saw their dreams disappear, but SSTO development kept going strong.

Today, the very notions of SSTO and spacelift are being redefined. Spacecraft like SpaceShipTwo and Lynx aren’t conventional rockets at all, but they’ll be able to deliver satellites into low orbits. Their role and impact in payload delivery has yet to be written, but their base of operations says it all. The Mojave Spaceport in Mojave, CA, is about an hour east of Bakersfield in the desert, and it’s host to the most cutting-edge space development companies in the world, leading Popular Mechanics to refer to it as “The New Area 51.” While men (and women) will no doubt be riding vehicles developed here into space, it’s the satellite business that’s really keeping an eye on Mojave.

Currently there are more than 500 satellites in orbit, originating from any of 22 major space launch sites in the world. Up ’til now, most of the launches have been from military installations, like California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, on rockets developed under government contract with big-name aerospace companies. And there have been choices: Lockheed Martin has Atlas rockets, Boeing has Delta. The Chinese have Long March rockets, the Russians have Soyuz, the Ukrainians have Zenit and Proton and The European Space Agency favors Ariane rockets. And so on. But the future seems to be in smaller companies and private spaceports, like Mojave.

SpaceX says its Falcon 9 rocket (almost ready to launch, as previously mentioned) offers improved reliability, lower cost and better overall efficiency compared to the big boys. Other private companies are promising the same from their launch vehicles, and it’s not tough to see why they want to be in the game—and why they might have a chance.

In the late 1990s, two companies, Globalstar and Iridium, were racing to set up the first satellite telecommunications networks. Globalstar had already put 52 satellites into orbit on launches of seven Delta 2 rockets and six Russian Soyuz rockets (each carrying four satellites) when, in a bid to leap forward, the company put 12 satellites on a single Ukrainian Zenit 2 rocket. It launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in September of 1998. Five minutes later, it exploded and all 12 satellites were lost—at a cost of nearly $185 million and 40 percent of the company’s stock. And that was more than ten years ago.

Obama’s new plan for NASA (more on this later) promises $6 billion for investment in private sector space development. If, as they claim, the smaller companies can improve reliability, lower costs and increase overall efficiency, it will be money well spent. If not, the big boys aren’t leaving the building anytime soon. In fact, under NASA’s new mission, they may be going further than they ever have.

Country

“It was from here that men and women, propelled by sheer nerve and talent, set about pushing the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” Those words came near the opening of President Obama’s speech to a group of engineers, astronauts and NASA employees this April at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That statement, and the rest of Obama’s speech, were met with cautious applause from the mostly NASA crowd, many of whom have lived through decades of dramatic agency budget shifts, occasionally aimless leadership and harsh criticism. The agency’s latest mission, a plan from former President Bush named “Constellation,” suffered from plenty of the last, and subsequently didn’t find its way into the 2011 budget of his replacement.

Stated in the most basic terms, Constellation’s main goal was to put Americans back on the moon. To do this, Bush wanted NASA to develop a large rocket (Ares V) that would be topped by a crew capsule (Orion) and a lunar landing module (Altair). If you think that sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. President Obama said Constellation was “over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation,” then offered this bit about the moon: “I just have to say, pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do.” The President effectively killed Constellation (there are bits and pieces that will stay in play) then introduced his own new plan that, in a nutshell, aims to outsource many low-orbit spaceflight missions (like ISS crew transport) to the private sector, leaving NASA to focus on deep space exploration and an eventual Mars mission.

“I believe it’s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach —and operate at — a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward,” he said.

Critics don’t like the idea of American astronauts potentially hitching rides to the ISS on Russian spacecraft, and they don’t like killing a $108 billion plan (and the attached jobs) after already spending $10 billion on it. Supporters argue that space exploration should be a cooperative effort, that missions like ISS transport are best left to private developers and that the agency tasked with defining America’s role in space should be aiming high with the same kinds of awe-inspiring goals it used to chase.

Buzz Aldrin (the second man to set foot on the moon) likes the new plan. Neil Armstrong (the first) doesn’t and believes canceling Constellation was a bad move. In an open letter, he and two other commanders (Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, and Jim Lovell of Apollo 13) wrote that, “For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature. Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity.”

Aldrin thinks this perspective misses the mark. In an interview with MSNBC, he pointed out that government started the business of commercial flight, then pulled back and let airlines take over. Letting the private sector handle day-to-day missions while NASA focuses on the big stuff, he says, isn’t so different. And while he doesn’t like the idea of Americans riding Russian spacecraft to the ISS, he doesn’t think it will be necessary. There are currently military rockets like the Atlas V, he suggested, that could be repurposed. And many private developers are working on exactly the same kinds of technology. The important thing, Aldrin said, is that we should move forward—and boldly.

“We should not go back to landing in the ocean,” he said, “after 30 years of successfully landing on a runway.”