A mere three years after Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne skimmed the edge of space to capture the $10-million Ansari X Prize, more than half a dozen companies are furiously building and testing spacecraft designed to take paying passengers on suborbital journeys and beyond.

Late this month, if everything goes according to plan, Space Exploration Corporation, or SpaceX for short, will launch its privately funded two-stage rocket, Falcon I, into low-Earth orbit, carrying with it the U.S. Department of Defense’s TacSat-1 satellite. The ride costs just under $6 million, a price that undercuts the competition by up to two thirds. “We want to be the Southwest Airlines of space launches,” says SpaceX CEO and PayPal founder Elon Musk.

Ever since he returned from the ultimate getaway—six months aboard space station Mir—Alexander Poleschuk has not had much patience for the mundane. Even today, 10 years later, there’s a kind of contained restlessness about the former cosmonaut as he sits, drinking tea and fingering his cigarette pack, in a Toyota dealership on the bleak, block-housing-lined outskirts of Moscow, waiting for his car to emerge from the service bay.

Hawks in the the Pentagon and other government agencies may have been elated when the Bush administration announced its plans to gear up for armed conflict in space, but former astronaut Sally Ride had a different reaction. She called the plans "disastrous," because destroying enemy satellites and other objects in space means creating more space debris.