When most Americans suffer a midlife crisis, they buy a shiny new muscle car or a Harley-Davidson. When Nasa suffered a midlife crisis (it’s 50 years old), it bought a $100 billion space station. There’s just one problem - getting there.

Nasa’s ageing shuttle fleet is due to retire in 2010, and its new spacecraft are still on the drawing board. Enter the private sector. Following three failed attempts, SpaceX, a space transportation company based here on the west coast, successfully launched its own Falcon 1 spacecraft last weekend. The Falcon 1 is the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to orbit the Earth and will soon be launching satellites for commercial customers.

Unlike America’s struggling banking and car industries, home-grown space companies are soaring. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, a dotcom millionaire. In just six years and working with a budget a fraction the size of Nasa’s, the company designed and built the Falcon 1 from scratch.

SpaceX is now developing a larger Falcon 9 launcher and a reusable craft called Dragon, which together will be capable of carrying a human crew into orbit. Perfect for flying Nasa astronauts to the international space station. When hard-pressed US taxpayers see what SpaceX can do with just a few hundred million dollars, the multi-billion-dollar cost of Nasa’s programme might start to look, well, astronomical.

Nasa counters by pointing out that it has ambitions far beyond near space. Its enormous Ares launchers and Orion crew module are scheduled to take Americans to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars. The craft were due to replace the shuttle but delays mean they will not be ready for missions to the international space station until 2015.

If Nasa can’t find any other way of getting its astronauts into space for some time after 2010 it may have to beg the Russians for lifts on its Soyuz spacecraft. With East-West relations getting chillier, that’s not how it wants to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

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