Yes, there is...

It is a telling sign of the times that also during that same week, Elon Musk's SpaceX, an emerging low-cost launch company, test-launched their Falcon-1 rocket. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin filed plans with the FAA for another round of launch and landing tests. Sir Branson's Virgin Galactic has booked 200 people for spaceflights planned to begin in 2009. New Mexico is getting ready to vote on building a spaceport to accommodate these commercial ventures. And there are others. This progress is just 3 years after Burt Rutan won the Ansari X Prize for the first private spaceflight. In step with the classic scenario, these upstarts are doing what the incumbent can't. This is likely to become the venue of future human spaceflight.

Typically incumbents will deny the trends and just intensify their retrograde efforts. The upstarts are dismissed as irrelevant when judged against the established visions.

I've said it here for years, NASA is never ever going to get us to Mars or anywhere. It's a JOBS program, not a space program.
Fortunately, Moore's Law is making aerospace design more doable by small concerns (q.v. Armadillo) and nanotech will make solar system exploration viable within 30 years, assuming Congress doesn't prohibit it by passing trial lawyer benefiting onerous inhibitions.