Virgin Galactic has signed a deal with NASA to carry equipment and experiments sub-orbital, too:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/08/10/technology-virgin-galactic-nasa.html
But what I don't get is if NASA is getting out of the putting men into space business for now - or, to be specific, retiring the successful technology it's used for 30 years in favor of new stuff - why do companies like Boeing and Virgin Galactic still need to spend years upon years testing with no apparent input from NASA? Why cannot someone with deep pockets simply purchase the blueprints for the shuttle and start building their own?
It was the same issue with the Saturn V. When NASA started looking at going back to the moon a decade ago, a big deal was made of the fact they needed to learn how to do it again because apparently no plans remain from the Saturn V. Or something. IMO it's one of the reasons we ultimately weren't able to go back, because someone realized it would take too long and be too expensive to, in every literal sense of the word, reinvent the wheel.
I'm not saying stagnate the technology - the shuttle is 30 years old; the Saturn V going on 50 and if we want to go beyond the Moon we need something new - but these technologies worked and anyway all I'm seeing is stuff to take us suborbital and, maybe, to the ISS. Branson isn't building a moon rocket. Virgin and Boeing would be able to rake in a ton of cash to develop new designs, etc. if they took all those people who paid their millions and instead of making them wait years, build a new shuttle and send them up. And none of this "suborbital" nonsense. People have been speculating about "orbital hotels" for years, forgetting that all they really need to do is build a NASA-style shuttle, install a dozen sleeping cabins in what would be the cargo area, send the shuttle into orbit for a week like it usually does, and there you go. Dangerous? Of course, but if you consider that in the history of the shuttle program there were only 2 major accidents and basically only the one, Apollo 13, in the case of the Saturn V (Apollo 1 doesn't count as that happened during a test on the ground). I don't know the stats, but that probably compares nicely with, say, Concorde or other air travel passenger vehicles.
I understand the rationale about not letting other countries get hold of the plans. No one at NASA, I bet, wants to see China claim the moon anytime soon, so let them figure out how to get there. But we're talking Boeing and Virgin here - these types of companies wrote the book on keeping proprietary information secret.
Ale
