NASA's critics have long asked: Why does the space agency need to design and build its own rockets and spacecraft? When the Justice Department or the Centers for Disease Control want to send employees somewhere, they don't specify the aircraft types, let alone design the airframes, engines and avionics. They just buy plane tickets.

Right: Orbital Sciences Corporation: An artist's impression of Orbital Sciences' Cygnus capsule approaching the International Space Station.

Even the military finds it cheaper to use civilian aircraft for certain missions. So why should space transportation be any different? NASA's beginning to agree. For the first time, after nearly a half century of building its own rockets and orbiters, it has approved the outsourcing of some of the equipment that enables its manned space missions to private contractors.

Last week, acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese told a congressional subcommittee that the agency plans to give $150 million in stimulus-package money to private companies that design, build and service their own rockets and crew capsules — spacecraft that could put astronauts in orbit while NASA finishes building the space shuttle's replacements.

Left: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Dragon

On Thursday, the White House ordered a top-to-bottom review of the entire manned space program, one that will be led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, long considered a friend of private space ventures. Both developments show that the once-reluctant space agency and the Obama administration are ready to support commercial human spaceflight.

It's a dramatic change, one that could reduce America's dependency on Russia for the next half-decade after the space shuttle program ends, and one that could kick-start a space program that some see as having stalled for 40 years.

"Our government space program has become over-burdened with too many objectives, and not enough cash," says William Watson, executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation, a Houston-based group promoting commercial space activities. Watson said that allowing private companies to handle routine orbital duties could free up NASA to focus on returning to the moon and going to Mars.

Right: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket during a test at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Scolese said that $80 million of the stimulus money will be awarded to the company that demonstrates the best "crewed launch demo" — a prototype, based on existing cargo-capsule designs, modified for humans. The agency was careful to note that the competition will be an open one.

Two well-positioned spaceflight companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, are seen as the leading contenders. Each already has a full line of rockets and cargo capsules ready to go, and each company's capsules can be converted to transport astronauts.

Both firms were tight-lipped about their suddenly increased opportunities. Orbital Sciences didn't respond to queries; SpaceX said only that it was "encouraged by NASA's commercial crewed services initiative."

Left: Orbital Sciences Corporation: An artist's impression of an Orbital Sciences Taurus II rocket blasting into space.

But NASA's savings in cost and time could be significant.

The two leading contractors are building their launch vehicles from scratch. Their designs emphasize very efficient business models and low manufacturing costs. And they operate with at most a few dozen employees at their launch sites, as opposed to the space shuttle program's standing army of almost 15,000 workers.

NASA's hostility toward other American space ventures goes back at least to the early 1990s, when Lockheed Martin developed the DC-X suborbital experimental rocket, financed by the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).

The goal was to get payloads into orbit with a reusable craft that was not the space shuttle, which the Defense Department saw as unreliable and costly.

By Taylor Dinerman, Fox News, Saturday, May 09, 2009