-- The following is an exert out of Present at the Future where 'Elon Musk' talks about what his company 'SpaceX' is currently working on and what he and some other companies are planning in the near future. I find this absolutely amazing.

 Taken from:
    Present ant the Future, Chapter Seventeen, "There's no Business like Space Business"

  Elon Musk is the CEO and chief designer of Space Exploration Technologies, otherwise known as SpaceX. SpaceX is a rocket company. Our goal is to solve, or help solve, what I consider to be by far and away, the great problem of space, which is the cost of getting there. We are starting off with a small launch vehicle called Falcon 1, named after the Millennium Falcon. I hope George Lucas doesn't sue us.
    Falcon 1 will be a proof of concept.
    It is designed to put small satellites into orbit and test the key technologies necessary to go bigger and to build manned rockets and manned capsules. But looking into the future, the big development  at SpaceX is something called Falcon 9, which is considerably larger. In its largest version Falcon 9, would be capable of putting twenty five tons into Earth's orbit. And it's also capable of missions to geosynchronous orbit and to escape.
  And Falcon 9 is also being built from the ground up with what's called a manned safety rating, so that the margins of safety in the design of components are higher than they are in an unmanned rocket. That's something that isn't all that hard to do if you design the rocket from the beginning to do that, but it's very difficult to retrofit a rocket to be man-rated.
  The ultimate goal of SpaceX is not tourism, as it is for Branson's  company, but a much bolder goal: the colonization of other planets.
  SpaceX is really to help enable humanity become a space-faring civilization and one day, a multiplanet species. To do so, he must first lower the cost and improve the reliability of the service to the point where if you want to move to Mars, you should be able to do so if you can afford the median house in California.
  Tumlinson (founder of Space Frontier Foundation) is concerned with a business model too: the one driving NASA. The space agency has been traditionally seen as pioneer, a trailblazer, the Lewis and Clark of space travel, going where no human has ever gone before. But space exploration has now been going on for more than 50 years, and it's time for private businesses to get a firm foothold, he reasons. After all, it was way before 50 years after the Wright brothers flew their crude airplanes at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, that private airlines were ferrying passengers. It's time to turn space travel over to the private sector, where it can be commercialized. Tumlinson believes that NASA understands his point of view and agrees with it. But he is concerned that NASA's coziness with the contractors who have been working with the agency for decades, who have received and continue to receive billions of dollars to design and build future space vehicles, will shut out the fledgling competitors.
  So we already have the aerospace companies, the traditional aerospace companies, as I call them, saying that they're building a variation of their vehicle which will actually compete with these nonsubsidized private companies that are going to be allegedly carrying stuff to and from stations. So I see a few years down the road, we could have real trouble there, as the smaller guys get kind of booted out of the way by these heavily subsidized aerospace companies.
  If we're going to settle and stay and create the communities that Elon was speaking of, we have to make all of our decisions with that in mind. And that gets to the Lewis-and-Clark function for government and the enabling and protecting and nurturing the new private-sector companies that are going to be the ones who actually create the economy that allows us to stay. One of the big challenges is going to be to get NASA focused on a supportive roles for this industry rather than the not-invented-here, do-it-yourself approach. Because as we say in our group, nobody stays until somebody pays. And I really don't want it to be the taxpayers.
  The private sector is absolutely critical, is indeed indispensable to NASA's exploration plans. It is literally impossible for NASA to do what it wants without bringing in strong involvement of the private sector.
  And a good place to start involving and encouraging the privatization of space is in the completed space station. So that's the first thing to get the space shuttle's expenses put to bed.  And that'll free up, I hope, some money from some commercialization activity that will support the space station. All the supplies and cargo shouldn't be flown up on NASA rockets; they should be flown up on commercial enterprises that can bid for that business and get NASA out of the freight business and get it back in the exploring business. That may be the surface of the moons where we go or the asteroids, which I would like to see visited pretty quickly, and then eventually, to Mars.
  What we really need is a partnership, as we move out, between the government playing the Lewis-and-Clark role on the leading edge, and this is where we screw up and have screwed up in the past. Built into that Lewis-and-Clark function should be a constant handoff of operational activities to the private sectors, such as Elon's company, and the things Rutan(CEO of Scaled Composites - private space travel company.) might build, and others out there. Just constantly shedding. So we have what I call a lean, mean exploration machine, in the form of NASA moving outward. And the settlers and shopkeepers bringing up the rear and creating an economy.