“It’s dismaying that NASA officials would be directed to use this crisis to score domestic political points on behalf of the White House.” Marco Cáceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at Teal Group, is also perturbed. “It sounds like they are trying to use the crisis [in Crimea] as a way to increase NASA’s funding,” he says, “but it’s a disingenuous way of making the case, especially since there are a lot of other good reasons to increase NASA’s budget.” Currently, the agency’s budget is just under $18 billion — a level of funding that the agency has maintained more or less for the last six years. “NASA is extremely underfunded as it is,” Cáceres says. “Any recent increases have been barely enough to keep up with inflation.”

Cáceres says he is more concerned with NASA’s prediction that the agency will be able to launch from US soil as early as 2017. Even with a marked increase in NASA funding, he says, the likelihood of a US-based launch is minuscule because NASA doesn’t currently have access to a viable means of transportation to the ISS. “There really isn’t any great option in terms of a vehicle,” he says. “Even if you were to increase [NASA's] budget by 10 or 20 percent — maybe even 50 — you still wouldn’t have a good way of getting up there.” Cáceres says that although NASA is developing a heavy-lift rocket system called the Space Launch System, it won’t be ready for a crewed spaceflight before 2021.

It will rocket into space in 2015 with the blessing of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which last week awarded the firm a $17.8 million contract to demonstrate the technology. Eventually, Las Vegas hotelier Robert Bigelow wants to build separate stations that might be used as research laboratories orbiting Earth or to establish a permanent presence on the moon or Mars. "Ultimately, he's hoping to build hotels in low-earth orbit and have that be one of the up-and-coming space businesses — this will give him more credibility," said Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst with Teal Group Corp. in Fairfax, Virginia. "There's a lot of people out there that say, 'Oh c'mon, hotels in low-earth orbit — that's a fantasy right?' I believe he has the tools to do it." The challenge will be finding customers, Caceres said in a phone interview. Bigelow's primary focus is on corporations and governments interested in developing astronaut programs or doing research. Space tourism is secondary, and the company has tried to steer away from the space hotel label.

Each mission is expected to take about a month; it takes about five days for the Cygnus to make it to the station, it will stay there for anywhere from two weeks to two months, and it will take another day or two for the spacecraft to disintegrate on reentry. "The idea of now relying on private industry and let[ting] them lead the way has already been decided," said Marco A. Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group. "The question is: Can industry do it without too many failures?" He said Orbital's success, along with that of SpaceX, which has already made it to the space station, would provide the needed competition and potentially open the door to more companies. "There's a lot at stake here because you're really talking about the future of human spaceflight. It's not going to be NASA that does it," said Caceres. "It's these companies ... that are supposedly going to be colonizing the moon and maybe even Mars."