WashingtonTimes.com ARTICLE

[Excerpt]:

"Today the U.S. government's reaction to China's
challenge should not be a new space race and bigger
NASA budgets. Rather, the United States should turn to
private providers in a free market to open outer space
to all humanity... Since NASA already is considering
major changes in light of the Columbia disaster, the
Chinese launch should spur it to real innovation. It
should phase out its flights to orbit and instead
contract out for rides on private rockets. It should
place space station management and expansion in
private hands. And if it needs transitional vehicles,
it should look to private suppliers for versatile
systems that can serve commercial purposes. Further,
the U.S. government should remove current barriers to
private commercial space companies. For example, the
Commercial Space Transportation office in the Federal
Aviation Administration was created to speed the
licensing process for private rocket launches. But
other parties within the FAA want to classify many
suborbital rockets as "experimental aircraft," which
would foist enough new regulations on emerging private
launch companies to kill them in the crib. And in
1999, export licensing was moved from the Commerce
Department, which did a tolerable job of facilitating
private American multinational space activities, to
the State Department, which does a terrible one, again
chaining American entrepreneurs to the ground."