This is great news. NASA looks to start building a real space industry, not just to use a few prototype ships to ferry supplies to the ISS.

I wonder if NASA's role will shift to more of an administrative and supervisory agency over private space companies, sort of like the DOD's relationship with military contractors, or the SEC's role with banks.

Hopefully more like FAA role

>> the contracted services would include logistical and research cargo delivery and return to and from the space station through fiscal year 2020

SpaceX is the only one of two current contractors capable of returning cargo. Seems a bit skewed in favor of Falcon/SpaceX? Unless Sierra Nevada has the cargo capacity on the Dream Chaser...

...or Orbital Sciences has a return pod in the works. I would think they would be working on something, especially since SpaceX is already there.

I wish someone would make the NASA site look less boring.

Really? I think somehow the blandness of its site echoes its historical context - it seems like a website built at the inception of websites, just how I associate NASA and space exploration. To each his own.

Despite the arguments in past years that funding NASA and space programming is a waste of government and private dollars, sure to have nothing other than futile and novelty implications, I have always been in favor of it. There is something about it, as I see it, that represents possibility, limitless thinking, and optimism. If we scrap the funding, it seems to me a sort of surrender to cynicism, insularity, and mediocrity.

I really hope they don't.

That page loaded in a few seconds for me. Most pages take much longer but do not have much more information or functionality.

This page is a press release. It serves a special purpose. Other parts of the NASA website are less plain.