perfidy

The X-Prize has a launch site! (New Mexico.) The New York Times has details, but the coolest part is this:

Organizers of the X Prize have said teams could attempt the space trip as early as this summer. Twenty-seven teams are expected to pursue the prize, and many have conducted test launches.

Twenty-seven teams (!) (!!) are in contention for a prize that will not even come close to recouping their costs. This is awesome.

Here's an interesting set of questions for those speculators among you. Given that Sea Launch has taken a financial beating recently in the wake of the failures of ventures like Iridium, which seem to suggest that the era of private space flight is not yet here*, what do you think the future will be like? Broadly, I see two competing models. One is the Sea Launch model which relies on loads of money and operational support to get their job done, and the other would be a potentially more mom-and-pop operation which would rely on economical and repeatable launches, though possibly of smaller payloads. Are these two models really in competetion, or will they be compatible as the era of private space flight dawns? Given that there is a LOT of risk in spaceborne ventures (viz. Iridium) and at the moment a limited number of things that space is actually useful for, will the near-future situation favor one or the other strategy of orbital lifting?

*Yes, yes, I understand that Iridium's problems were with the shoebox phones, the expensive, brittle, obselete and irreparable network, and the simple fact that there are at best only a few thousand people in the world who need to make a phone call from the Sargasso Sea. But from an enterprise/venture capital point of view, I suspect the word "space" currently sounds a bit like it does in the phrases "Space Monkey" or "Space TV Dinner."