San Jose, Calif. -- Hans Koenigsmann is one of dozens of engineers attempting to convert the dream of building vehicles for a commercial space industry into a thriving business. Using off-the-shelf technologies, the vice president of avionics for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is helping design the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spaceship, which could someday replace the space shuttle.

"There has never been a successful privately financed liquid-fuel [space] vehicle to date. There have been many attempts, but all have failed," said Koenigsmann. "I like the challenge."

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX; El Segundo, Calif.) and another company, Rocketplane Kistler (Oklahoma City), are sharing $500 million over four years as part of a NASA contract to get private industry to start building the vehicles NASA needs to maintain the International Space Station. The two companies and another half-dozen like them hope to use combinations of government and private funds to create spacecraft that could serve commercial as well as civil purposes.

Established giants, including the likes of Cisco Systems Inc., are gathering around these pioneers in search of new opportunities. Some believe they are opening a portal to a Jetsons-like era, while others see the efforts as part of a long history of attempts that have fizzled.

Like many of its competitors, SpaceX aims to conduct trial unmanned launches in the next two years. The trials could lead to flights carrying as many as seven people. The spaceliners would eventually depart eight times a year for the Space Station and commercial destinations still on the drawing board. "Our goal is to make space exploration cheaper and more reliable," said Koenigsmann. "I don't have a hard budget, but we hope to have recurring flight costs of just a few million dollars and initial development costs [for avionics] of less than $25 million."

A big part of the challenge is "building up the engineering team," which needs to double its staff of 35 EEs in 2007, he added.

Engineers have their pick of pioneering employers in the emerging astrospace industry. Besides its NASA project, Rocketplane Kistler is working on the Rocketplane XP, a four-person modified Lear 25 jet. The company hopes the jet will take people into short suborbital flights 66 miles above the Earth starting in 2008 at a cost of about $200,000 each.

Burt Rutan, who won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for developing a working commercial spacecraft, is designing a second version at his company, Scaled Composites LLC (Mojave, Calif.). It is due to fly by 2009. The company has a contract with Virgin Galactic, which hopes to use the vehicles to become one of the first commercial space carriers.

A handful of companies are at various stages of designing other commercial spacecraft.

"In the next couple years, we will see the first flights of commercial vehicles carrying passengers and payloads into suborbital space. These vehicles weren't even being considered a few years ago," said Jeff Krukin, who is executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation (Nyack, N.Y.), a group lobbying for a commercial space industry.

Rick Sanford, director of the global space initiative at Cisco Systems, is tracking as many as six opportunities that could emerge in the next two years to put communications systems into new commercial spacecraft or the ground stations that will manage them. "The opportunity for Cisco is to take what we are doing terrestrially and create partnerships to take these protocols into space for next-generation global services," said Sanford.

The 15-person Cisco team has been active since 1999. It participated in the launch of a commercial router from Russia in 2003 that is still conducting tests linking a single spacecraft with its ground station.

"My goal is to get a radiation-hardened router in space and develop routing not for just one spacecraft and its ground station as we have done, but a network of spacecraft and ground stations that work seamlessly," said Hugh Arif, who manages Cisco's civil space programs.

Cisco has ported its IOS router software to the rad-hard SBC RAD750 single-board computer from BAE Systems plc. It expects to port IOS to two or three other rad-hard boards for space flight, said Sanford.

Space tourism is the first driver for this new industry. Russia has already taken four tourists to the International Space Station at a cost of about $20 million each. Charles Simonyi, who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel, is in training to become the fifth sometime in 2007.

With the aim of creating generic space destinations that could be customized to become labs, hotels or zero-gravity sports centers, startup Bigelow Aerospace Inc. has launched a prototype inflatable capsule. The Genesis I, now orbiting 350 miles above Earth, is just 11.5 cubic meters in size, but Bigelow plans to launch a capsule three times larger by 2010.

Krukin said the new suborbital vehicles could someday open a door to a service that could shuttle packages or people from, say, Sydney, Australia, to New York in two hours.

Longer term, people foresee permanent civil and commercial lunar outposts specializing in everything from science and tourism to mining for elements like helium. Cisco is collaborating with Ball Aerospace and NASA to deliver by September a suggested architecture that would use lasers and small satellites to handle broadband communications with such outposts. The outposts will need space-ready versions of everything used on Earth, including moon-moving bulldozers already on the drawing board at Caterpillar, said Krukin. "We will need to dig trenches and build structures on the moon. Ultimately, we are extending the whole economy into space," he said.

$1B and no change
Skeptics think otherwise. There's no real market for commercial space travel and no real spacecraft with full Earth-orbit potential on the near-term horizon, said John E. Pike, director and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, a Web site dedicated to military and aerospace news. The spacecraft actually in design can only muster suborbital launches, he said.

"It's hard for me to take some of this stuff seriously," said Pike.

Meanwhile, according to Pike, Rocketplane Kistler "has eaten up $1 billion in investments, and they haven't flown anything."

Koenigsmann of SpaceX argues that off-the-shelf technologies are as robust as military/ aerospace- or space-grade parts that go through special testing for resistance to failure due to severe shaking, temperatures or exposure to X-rays. "Things have changed in terms of reliability of components. These days we don't see commercial devices failing more than mil/aero or space devices," said Koenigsmann.