Anything is possible. But the only thing that is going to really destroy this program (and NO it isn't either the shuttle nor the ISS) is going to be large cuts in NASA's budgets. Anyone with any degree of intelligence at all realizes that totally eliminating NASA's ENTIRE budget is going to do literally nothing to help balance the federal budget. NASA's entire budget is only about 3% of the deficit itself, and less then 0.7 % of the entire federal budget! So the incredibly false argument that cutting NASA's budget is going to have any affect on the federal deficit is just plain BULL!!<br /><br />Actually, as NASA is one of the very few true INVESTMENTS in the future instead of a total EXPENSE of the federal government, it SHOULD get at least modest increases. While I don't really expect congress to suddenly adopt a farseeing attitude, I can at least hope for a modest look ahead.<br /><br />Now, as to the private interests just taking over and beating NASA back to the moon and on to Mars, where is the profit to private industry in doing that? Remember that private industry investor types NEVER do anything that does not result in profits! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! If you do NOT realize this simple fact of capitalistic life then you need to go back to school and take Economics 101! It just DOES NOT happen!<br /><br />Now, it might just happen that at least Burt Rutan will indeed make short hops into sub orbital space profitable. And if you think that accidents in NASA's programs are a problem, you wait and see what happens if there are ANY such problems with a very marginalized (at least for profit) program for space tousism. This is why there is still such a need for the insurance program of NASA's human space flight program. I mean if there were no ISS then where would the last three space tourists have gone to?<br /><br />Now, I would be more than happy to see pure private efforts be very, very successful! No problem. But it is a long way from sub orbital flights