Saturday, April 30, 2011

Rwanda Is Rebuilding Its Tourist Industry


Cocktails amid the cloud forests

By Antonia Windsor
Published: April 29 2011 22:12 | Last updated: April 29 2011 22:12
Rwandan tribesmen
Rwandan tribesmen perform a traditional greeting
“You can take the door off if you like, you’ll get better photographs.” Before I’ve even nodded my consent, pilot Jean de Dieu already has the door of the bright blue chopper in his hands. “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain,” I venture feebly as I assess the seat-belt situation.
I’m on the tarmac at Kigali airport in Rwanda, about to get a lift to the Volcanoes National Park, home to the endangered mountain gorillas, in a Robinson R44 helicopter. “We get a lot of tourists who want us to drop them off there,” says de Dieu, as though he is running a taxi service.
That Rwanda attracts the kind of tourist who prefers to charter a helicopter than make the long journey by road is testimony to the remarkable transformation the country has undergone since the 1994 genocide destroyed its infrastructure and its reputation. This is just the kind of tourist President Paul Kagame was hoping to attract when he began promoting travel to the region in 2003. By focusing on high-value, low environmental-impact tourism, Rwanda has attracted considerable foreign investment over the past few years, with a host of new openings aimed at the discerning tourist.
The trend began in 2007, when Kenyan hotel group Serena, part of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, took over the management of two properties and turned one into a five-star hotel in the capital Kigali and the other into a four-star property on the lakeside resort of Gisenyi. Then, in 2008, Governors’ Camp opened Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, right at the foot of the Virunga volcano chain and very close to the entrance of the Volcanoes National Park, prompting Virunga, the area’s original lodge, to undertake an extensive refurbishment. Last year a new lakeside lodge opened in Kibuye and a five-star property began to draw tourists to Nyungwe Forest, one of the largest remaining cloud forests in Africa. Visitors already seem to be taking note: revenue from international tourism rose 14 per cent last year.
We float up over the capital like an unleashed balloon, and the terracotta roofs of the neat hillside houses remind me of Tuscany, although they soon give way to the silver glint of tin. Rwanda is known as the land of 1,000 hills and from the air that seems an underestimate. The entire country is ruffled and pocked into slopes of varying gradient, every inch of which is tightly terraced. Soon, the dormant volcanoes of the Virunga mountain chain come into view and below us are lakes so still they look like pools of clouds. As we fly towards the three peaks of Sabyinyo volcano – one in Rwanda, one in Uganda and the third in Democratic Republic of Congo – the sienna slates of Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge emerge from the foliage of the foothills. We inch towards a shaved patch of grass, while a crowd of children huddle together to clap our descent.
Owned by a community co-operative and managed by Governors’ Camp, the lodge comprises individual cottages, each with a butler who comes to wake you in the morning with a fresh pot of coffee, gets the fire going and takes away your muddy boots to clean them when you come in. It’s the kind of place in which I could happily spend a week, slumped in a sofa with a couple of good books. But it would be foolish to come all this way and not see the mountain gorillas, which are Rwanda’s star attraction.
There are just 64 permits issued each day by the Rwanda Development Board, and groups are never larger than eight people. When I arrive for my briefing in the town of Musanze, I am assigned a family of 29 gorillas called Susa, and I’m joined by three young couples. The authorities must have thought we looked fit, because Susa are hiding out high up in the forest, and it is a strenuous two-hour trek through an eerily serene bamboo forest and up into a tangle of Hagenia abyssinica trees. However, the first sight of a fluffy black head emerging above the vegetation is an immediate distraction from the pain in my calves. We are able to creep incredibly close to these magnificent beasts without them so much as flinching; indeed, a large male silverback strolls right past while my attention is diverted elsewhere, giving my leg a punch in the process. Along with two silverbacks are some females, including one who is seven months pregnant, and a couple of boisterous youths. I spend an hour watching them and attempting to take a decent photograph, before descending to Virunga Lodge for a restorative massage and a lazy afternoon in a hammock.
Next stop is the lively lakeside town of Gisenyi on the border of Democratic Republic of Congo. The Serena hotel in Lake Kivu has become a favoured spot for weekenders from Kigali, with a private beach glinting with mother-of-pearl; big comfortable sun loungers, and a range of watersports. However, I’ve been tipped off that there is newer lakeside luxury on the shores of Kibuye, further south, and so I negotiate with the people who run Serena’s motorboat and get them to take me the two-hour journey by water (saving me a four-hour road trip). As we jet past the huge palm fronds and banana plants of small forested islands, I lean back, let the sun beat on my face and feel as if I’ve been transported to the Caribbean.
Nyungwe Forest Lodge
The Nyungwe Forest Lodge
Rounding a corner, a collection of stilted bamboo cottages come into view, jutting out of the steep banks of the lakeshore. “That’s Cormoron lodge,” the driver tells me. “It opened last October, and is owned by a Belgian woman who used to be a racing driver.” I get them to pull up at the little jetty and climb up along mint-lined paths to the reception. Rwanda was a Belgian colony from the 1920s until independence in 1962, and owner Nathalie Cox has spent most of her life here. Deciding to stay the night, I get my own wooden cabin, which is spacious and comfortable and has a balcony from which I can see the red glow of Democratic Republic of Congo’s live Nyiragongo volcano. In the morning, the lake looks so inviting I can’t resist taking a dive off the jetty and then borrow a kayak to spend a couple of hours paddling around the islets off the coast, and shouting the occasional amakuru, or good morning, to fishermen in their wooden dugout canoes.
Finally it’s time to hit the road and my driver turns up in a classic Toyota Land Cruiser to take me to Nyungwe Forest – an area of nearly 1,000 sq km teeming with wildlife, including colobus monkeys and chimpanzees. There may be potholes and endless twisting bends along the dirt road, but it is a stunning drive with the road snaking around the cliffs and the lake providing a dramatic backdrop. With the window down, the smell of eucalyptus wafts in, and the cries of local children who rush to the roadside to call “Muzungo, muzungo” (the regional term for tourist, from the Swahili word to wander aimlessly) and occasionally ask for pens or francs, but more often just wave and smile.
Acres of tea plantations herald our arrival at Nyungwe Forest Lodge, which was built with a substantial investment from Dubai World Africa (a subsidiary of the Dubai’s state investment company). “That’s the helipad,” says my driver signalling a clearing up ahead. It seems that every lodge worth its salt has one. And then the building appears, an imposing structure of dark wood and stone walls. Staff are awaiting our arrival with cold towels and juice and we are escorted into a spacious lounge with stylish modern furniture, arty coffee-table books and a blazing log fire – the sort of place you might find in South Africa. I am then taken to my private chalet, one of many scattered widely among the tea plantations, with a private deck overlooking the forest beyond. The rooms are huge with kingly bathrooms and I can well believe that each one cost the rumoured $1m to build and furnish.
The lodge isn’t the only new opening in the forest: there is also a canopy walk, the first of its kind in the region, and I am keen to get there before it closes for the day.
It’s a leisurely 20-minute stroll into the forest from the Uwinka Visitor Centre to the start of the walk. My guide points out epiphytic orchids, high on the trunk of a mahogany tree, and the blood-red leaves of the “welcome” tree. “When they fall, they create a red carpet,” he explains.
The canopy walk itself doesn’t look too daunting from the ground. It is 90m long at its main section and 50m off the ground. I begin with cocky confidence, but as I get halfway across the main section, the vertigo kicks in. Below me, clouds are wisping up through the trees like smoke and from this height the canopy below resembles hundreds of heads of broccoli. I hold on tightly to the metal wire at chest height and try to look out at the horizon, rather than down. After all, if I can fly in a helicopter with no doors, this should be easy.

MDC seeks revival ahead of Zimbabwe elections

MDC seeks revival ahead of Zimbabwe elections

Angola's Sonangol to invest $12 mln in Sao Tome ports

Angola's Sonangol to invest $12 mln in Sao Tome ports

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Zimbabwe may force miners to fund development - paper

Zimbabwe may force miners to fund development - paper

Obama Birth Certificate Released By White House (PHOTO)

Ford moves up Silverton shutdown on parts supply concerns

Ford moves up Silverton shutdown on parts supply concerns

Regime change in North Africa: The seeds of the Arab Spring are fecund, but will democracy bloom?

Regime change in North Africa: The seeds of the Arab Spring are fecund, but will democracy bloom?

Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore Under Threat

Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore Under Threat

South Sudan to adopt new constitution, claims Abyei

South Sudan to adopt new constitution, claims Abyei

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Mike Campbell-A Brave White Zimbabwe Farmer Dies


Mike Campbell

Mike Campbell, farmer of Zimbabwe, died on April 6th, aged 78

HE COULDN’T say he hadn’t been warned. In 2000, just as Robert Mugabe’s land reforms gathered pace, 20 or 30 young black “war veterans” appeared at Mike Campbell’s farm, Mount Carmel, near Chegutu, 60 miles south-west of Harare. They seemed set on staying. According to a government requisition order of 1999, this land belonged to them and to the poor blacks of Zimbabwe.
Mr Campbell offered them a shed to sleep in; he didn’t want them chopping down his trees to build their huts. From that point, hoodlums from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF Party kept turning up. Over the years, everything went. They stole the irrigation pumps and tractors he’d used to turn his 3,000 acres of veld into mango and citrus groves so lush that he had become the leading grower in Zimbabwe, selling his fruit to Marks & Spencer in England. They rustled his cattle, a special Sussex/Mashona herd of small, hardy beasts. They even stole the copper telephone wires on which the bright blue bee-eaters would sit and flash, and set fires round his stone-and-thatch farmhouse which he couldn’t put out, except with the garden hose he used to water his roses.
Within the first year they burned down his pride and joy, the Biri River Safari Lodge. This was his boyhood dream of a place: giraffe, impala, warthogs, game birds, and so many white-tailed wildebeest that even his German sea-captain ancestor, who had started farming and breeding wildebeest near the Cape in 1713, might have envied him. But systematically the invaders killed them. That was the worst until, in June 2008, the thugs broke into his house, abducted him and beat him up so badly, together with his wife, that his brain was damaged. A year later, he was forced out at gunpoint; 15 months later the farmhouse burned down. One of those uncontrollable veld fires, said the police.
All that time he fought to hold on. At one stage he sent the china and silver away for safety, as well as his favourite military chest; but then he thought it better to let the workers and servants see stuff coming into the house, and planting and buying going on. The land, after all, was his. He had first seen it as a soldier, up from South Africa to help defend Ian Smith’s Rhodesia against Mugabe’s guerrillas, and liked it so much that he had given up his businesses at home to settle there. He bought it fair and square on the open market in 1975—though it had to be stocked with guns like an armoury during those war years—and got a huge loan from the Land Bank to do so, which took him 24 years to repay. Mugabe came to power in 1980, but in 1999 the government declared “no interest” in his land, and he got title. He wasn’t moving.
Several of his white neighbours thought he was being too difficult, preferring to keep quiet, even giving to the Zanu-PF donation-gatherers when they called round. If they came to Mount Carmel Mr Campbell would tell them, straight, that the country was a disaster with no diesel or electricity, tea or sugar; so he wasn’t paying a cent to them. And when Nathan Shamuyarira, Mugabe’s minister of information, turned up with his retinue to say that the farm now belonged to him personally, or a relative of the minister appeared in his Toyota Prado taking pictures of “our” orchards, Mr Campbell told him he would have to kill him first.
Leaving the dogs
In his opinion, blacks couldn’t run large farms. They just divided the land into plots and picked at them, subsistence farming. Fifty of them had taken over the spread next door, trying to grow cotton, but their efforts were pathetic. If they wanted to eat, blacks needed white farmers. Or they needed jobs like the ones he could give them, a square deal. They would just be driven to stealing otherwise. He hadn’t supported apartheid in his youth, but in the army and in Rhodesia, he said, he had changed his mind. And his workers, 500 of them counting wives and children, didn’t dislike him for it; when the invaders attacked Mount Carmel they defended it, and when he came back after his beating—pretty unsteady on his legs—some of them hugged him. “We love these guys,” he said.
He kept on seeking legal redress, of course. As the government notices of intent kept coming, he applied for a protection order. In 2005, though, an amendment to the Zimbabwean constitution allowed the seizure of white land without court review or compensation. He went higher then, and in 2007 sued Mr Mugabe before the tribunal of the Southern African Development Community. Though 77 other white farmers eventually joined him, he was the first and foremost: Mike Campbell v Republic of Zimbabwe. And, astonishingly, he won—though the tribunal said it would have ruled differently if his land had really been given to poor blacks, rather than the president’s cronies.
Not that his victory made much difference. The thugs moved in, and in September 2009 the farm was burned, notwithstanding. Mr Campbell had left most of his things there, as well as the dogs, the cats, the hens and the old brown horse, in the firm belief that he would return. Instead, he ended his days in poverty in Harare. The last mango crop was sold for the minister’s profit, or rotted to purplish pulp in the pack sheds. Nature crept back, like the veld grass, to restate her original claim.

The Royal Wedding Circa 1981



My dear readers I was in Johannesburg almost 30 years ago when Charles and Diana had their wedding. It took place on a work day. Televisions were brought into every office so that people could watch. Everyone pretended to work but were mesmerized by the pageantry unfolding in London. Charles and Diana were truly beautiful people. I was amazed that a country with deep resentment for British rule was so fascinated by royal pageantry.

What I did not know then was that Charles was really in love with another woman-Camilla Parker Bowles. He could not have her because he was married. Was Diana a marriage of convenience or did he love her a bit? Only Charles knows and he will never say. Sadly Diana must have thought she was living a fairy tale come true. Only later did she come to know that she was sharing life with a man in love with another woman.
Topics:  the royal wedding 1981  

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Jack's South America: Me With My Dear Daughter Anna In Sao Paulo

Jack's South America: Me With My Dear Daughter Anna In Sao Paulo

South Africa's Rocket Man Elon Musk Prepares For Bigger Things


How tycoons will fuel spaceflight

NASA announces funding to four experimental spacecraft. WESH's Dan Billow reports.
With the shuttle program winding down, the future of American spaceflight may well depend on how starry-eyed tycoons spend their money — and some of NASA’s money as well.
Three of the four companies that are in line to receive $269.3 million from NASA for building future spaceships are privately held, and what's more, they're led by well-off individuals who have at least a hint of intrigue about them. The fourth company, Boeing, is partnering with Bigelow Aerospace, which was founded by hotel-chain billionaire Robert Bigelow and has its own orbital aspirations.
NASA has laid out a plan for paying out the money over the next year or so, with the aim of promoting the rise of a new set of spaceship operators in the post-shuttle era.
In a commentary, George Washington University communication researcher Linda Billings picks up on the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are going to ventures that are headed up by folks who already have hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Why do these 'commercial' space companies need government handouts?" she asks. "The awardees are not hard-up start-ups (and these government handouts are not their first)."
It's true that all four companies have received money from the federal government previously, but none of those companies would characterize the payments as "handouts" or "subsidies."
They'd see them instead as payments for services rendered, goods delivered, or milestones achieved along the path that NASA wants them to take. And the $50 million that's been paid out so far under NASA's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev, is dwarfed by the $9 billion paid to commercial providers such as Lockheed Martin for the development of NASA's now-canceled Ares 1 rocket and now-downsized Orion crew capsule.
Although the financial details are hard to come by, it's virtually certain that the four companies have already spent far more than they've received for their spaceship projects. It's also virtually certain that not all four projects will make it into orbit. Because NASA is spreading out its bets, failure is definitely an option.
Here's a recap on the four spaceship development projects that NASA will be supporting for the next year under the second phase of the CCDev program. I'll be focusing on these efforts on Saturday during a Second Life chat about the post-shuttle spaceflight era, presented by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. SLT/PT):
Blue Origin
Blue Origin's orbital space vehicle is designed to take on trips to the International Space Station.
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Blue Origin: The venture getting the least amount of money ($22 million) is arguably the most mysterious of the bunch. Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, set up Blue Origin in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of going into outer space. He has the country's only privately owned spaceport, nestled amid his 165,000-acre ranch in West Texas — and until CCDev came along, most people assumed he was targeting solely suborbital space tourism.
CCDev made clear that Bezos had higher ambitions: Blue Origin's agreement with NASA, made public in redacted form this week, shows that the company aims to build an orbital launch system capable of getting seven passengers to the International Space Station (or other destinations in low Earth orbit). Its space vehicle would initially be launched on an expendable rocket such as United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5, and eventually Blue Origin plans to field its own reusable rocket.
The suborbital effort is now seen as an interim step along the way to orbit. "The suborbital vehicle will be fully reusable and capable of flying three or more astronauts to an altitude of over 328,000 feet (above 100 kilometers) for science research and adventure," Blue Origin said. "The suborbital booster is currently undergoing integrated testing. ... The suborbital capsule will baseline key technologies for the orbital space vehicle, and is currently undergoing final assembly."
With rare exceptions, the only information publicly available about Blue's plans comes from government documents that must be made publicly available, such as the one released this week. Thus, it's hard to tell how much money Bezos has put into his rocket venture so far. But when you consider the construction costs for Blue Origin's production facility in Washington state, plus its facilities in Texas, plus all the testing it's done to date, it's unquestionably more than the $3.7 million the venture received under CCDev1 plus the $22 million it's due to get under CCDev2.
Blue Origin's partners include NASA's Ames Research Center and Stennis Space Center, United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin, Aerojet and the Air Force Holloman High Speed Test Track in New Mexico. The company's agreement with NASA says that Bezos "recognizes that successful development of an innovative space launch capability is a long-term endeavor and is committed to steady funding for development efforts to achieve a commercial orbital vehicle."
The company said NASA's support would "accelerate" the development of a reusable crew transportation system. "We are very pleased to continue working with NASA on development of our Crew Transportation System, and appreciate the confidence NASA places in Blue Origin," the company's program manager, Rob Meyerson, said in an emailed statement.
Sierra Nevada Corp.
An artist's conception shows Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser near a space station docking port.
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Sierra Nevada Corp.: Sierra Nevada received $20 million during CCDev1 and is getting $80 million in CCDev2 to continue development of its Dream Chaser space plane, which is based on the HL-20 lifting-body design that NASA pioneered back in the 1980s. The concept was revived by high-tech entrepreneur Jim Benson at SpaceDev and inherited by Sierra Nevada when it acquired SpaceDev in 2008. (Benson had left SpaceDev two years earlier and came up with a different spaceship concept, but he passed away in 2008 before he could get very far with the idea.)
Sierra Nevada's top corporate officers are in the public eye far less than Jeff Bezos. After all, Bezos is still the head of a publicly traded company, but CEO Fatih Ozmen and his wife, company president and chief financial officer Eren Ozmen don't have much reason to go public. Three years ago, a story about Sierra Nevada in the Las Vegas Sun called Fatih Ozmen a "mystery man."
The Ozmens started out as employees at Sierra Nevada and acquired the Nevada-based company in 1994. Since then, Sierra Nevada has grown into a big-time defense contractor with 29 locations in 15 states. Inc. magazine listed its 2009 revenue at just under a billion dollars.
Sierra Nevada's website lists numerous awards, including recognition as "the top woman-owned company demonstrating excellence in applying innovative IT solutions to the federal government." But the company has also experienced the occasional hiccup, such as recent questions over the development of an imaging pod for the Air Force, called Gorgon Stare.
The company's agreement with NASA lists 11 partners, including Boeing, United Launch Alliance, United Space Alliance, Aerojet, Draper Lab, NASA's Langley Research Center, AdamWorks, SAS, the University of Colorado, the U.S. component of Canada's MDA robotics company and Virgin Galactic (which is working with Sierra Nevada on "global marketing, sales and commercial operation" of the orbital Dream Chaser).
SpaceX
An artist's conception shows SpaceX's Draco thruster engines firing to separate the Dragon spacecraft from the Falcon 9 second stage. Side-mounted thrusters could be used as a launch abort system and landing system.
SpaceX: This California-based company, founded by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002, has notched a surprising number of space successes lately, including last December's launch-to-splashdown test of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule. NASA is supporting the development of the Falcon-Dragon system with $278 million under a separate program for cargo craft development, known as Commercial Orbital Transport Services or COTS. If SpaceX hits its marks, it will be in line for $1.6 billion worth of NASA contracts to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
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Musk has said it would take $1 billion and three years of work to adapt the Falcon-Dragon system to carry crew, primarily because of the expense of developing an emergency launch abort system. This week, he said the $75 million in CCDev2 money would put SpaceX on track to meet that schedule.
"The award will accelerate our efforts to develop the next generation of rockets and spacecraft for human transportation," Musk said in a statement. "With NASA's support, SpaceX will be ready to fly its first manned mission in 2014."
Musk has made no secret of his long-term goal: to open the way for colonizing Mars and turn humanity into a multiplanet species. This week's statement referred slyly to those ambitions by noting that SpaceX's thruster system would "provide the capability for Dragon to land almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth's atmosphere."
A couple of years ago, Musk said that he invested $100 million of his fortune in SpaceX — but there have been more recent indications that the spigot has been turned down on his personal cash flow. SpaceX recently reported raising $50 million in additional funds, and Musk said an initial public offering may take place next year. Last year, there were a flurry of reports about Musk's financial straits, which led him to discuss the situation candidly in the Huffington Post.
SpaceX's agreement with NASA says the $75 million would accelerate crew-transport development by 50 percent compared to an internally funded baseline. So what does that say about SpaceX's investment? That figure is blacked out in the agreement posted online, but if time is money, that might imply SpaceX is bringing $75 million of its own to the project. The section listing SpaceX's partners and institutional investors is also blacked out, but the company notes that it works in "close collaboration with four NASA centers and eight leading aerospace companies."
Boeing
Boeing's CST-100 craft approaches the International Space Station in an artist's concept.
The Boeing Co.: This aerospace giant is something of an outlier. It's publicly traded, and has been involved in the U.S. space effort for decades. Among other things, Boeing served as the prime contractor for construction of the International Space Station. Billings' knock against Boeing was that with $3.3 billion in profit for 2010, the company didn't need a government "subsidy" for its spaceship-building operation.
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However, Boeing's John Elbon repeatedly said in the run-up to the CCDev2 announcement that NASA had to serve as the anchor customer for the company's proposed CST-100 crew capsule. Without NASA support, the financial underpinnings of the project just didn't stand up. The $92.3 million in CCDev2 money, added to the $18 million from CCDev1, will keep Boeing on track to have the capsule ready for flight by 2015.
"By the end of CCDev2, our design will be firmed up and we'll have it synced up with NASA requirements so we understand our vehicle will meet those requirements," Boeing's John Elbon told reporters.
Boeing's go-ahead is also good news for Robert Bigelow, whose aerospace company has already put up two inflatable test modules into orbit on Russian spacecraft. Bigelow Aerospace is hoping that the CST-100 — perhaps launched on an Atlas 5, Delta 4 or Falcon 9 — can bring paying passengers to its future private-sector space stations as well as to the government-supported International Space Station.
In addition to Bigelow, Boeing's agreement with NASA lists Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Airborne Systems, ILC Dover, Spincraft, XCOR Aerospace, United Space Alliance and ARES Corp. as teammates and investors. Boeing also notes its agreements with Bigelow, Space Adventures and an additional blacked-out entity "to increase market growth."
Orbital Sciences Corp.
Orbital Sciences' Prometheus space plane, shown in this artist's conception, was one of the proposals that NASA passed up. Orbital is now reportedly planning to mothball the concept.
What separated the winners and losers: NASA has now released the full list of companies proposing CCDev2 spaceship projects, plus short rundowns on why particular proposals were chosen or eliminated. It's fascinating reading for space geeks.
The also-rans included alphaSpaces, Andrews Space, ATK Aerospace Systems, Excalibur Almaz, ILC Dover, Innovative Space Propulsion Systems, KT Engineering, Oceaneering International, Orbital Outfitters, Orbital Sciences Corp., Orbital Space Transport, Paragon Space Development Corp., PlanetSpace, Spacedesign Corp., TGV Rockets, Transformational Space Corp. (a.k.a. t/Space), United Launch Alliance and United Space Alliance.
Philip McAlister, acting director of NASA Headquarters' Commercial Spaceflight Development program, said Boeing and SpaceX were clear standouts from the rest of the pack. "They were the only ones to receive 'very high' confidence ratings, which I consider significant," he wrote.
ATK, Excalibur Almaz and United Launch Alliance were among the finalists, but McAlister said Excalibur Almaz was eliminated due to low ratings, especially on business considerations. He opted not to go with ATK and United Launch Alliance in part because of their lack of linkage to a crew-carrying vehicle. Those two companies were proposing only to build launch vehicles, and McAlister put somewhat less weight on that side of the equation.
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"Within the U.S. industrial base, there is considerable launch vehicle development expertise, as many companies have successfully developed new launch vehicles over the last few decades," he explained. "In contrast, no U.S. company has successfully developed a crew-carrying spacecraft in over 30 years."
In other words, not since the space shuttle ... unless you count the private-sector SpaceShipOne rocket plane, which made three suborbital space trips in 2004
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin's Space Operations Simulation Center in Colorado can simulate on-orbit docking maneuvers using mockups of the Orion spce capsule, left, and the International Space Station.
So what's next? The CCDev2 covers the development timeline through May 2012, but NASA is looking for another $850 million to cover the third phase of the program, CCDev3. Being a CCDev2 winner doesn't guarantee that you'll get CCDev3 funding, and it's possible that a company not receiving money in one phase of the program could be funded for a future phase. For example, SpaceX didn't receive any funding in CCDev1 but was awarded $75 million in CCDev2.
The agreements with NASA spell out milestones that must be met in order to receive incremental payments. It's not guaranteed that all the companies will meet all the milestones. For example, Rocketplane Kistler was awarded up to $207 million from COTS, NASA's cargo spacecraft development program, but the company couldn't reach its investment target and was cut off after receiving $32.1 million for hitting earlier milestones.
If the CCDev process is successful, NASA should be able to choose from new U.S.-built spaceships for launching astronauts to the International Space Station in the 2014-2015 time frame. In the meantime, the space agency will have to rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft for crew transport. NASA expects to begin sending cargo up to the International Space Station on remote-controlled craft provided by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. as early as next year.
Separately, NASA is also funding Lockheed Martin's work of the Orion crew capsule, which is currently envisioned as a NASA-operated emergency crew escape vehicle. Such capsules would be launched to the space station without a crew, thus minimizing the flight risk.
The Orion may well turn into the multipurpose crew vehicle that Congress wants NASA to develop for trips beyond Earth orbit. Congress has set aside $1.2 billion in the current fiscal year for the Orion-based crew vehicle, plus $1.8 billion for a heavy-lift rocket capable of putting 130 tons of payload into orbit. Lawmakers want to see that mission accomplished by 2016, but NASA isn't sure the job can be done
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Even if the beyond-Earth space transport system is ready by 2016, NASA is expected to use commercial transports to get astronauts to and from the space station. Using a heavy-lifter to send astronauts to low Earth orbit would be like using a semi to get from one end of town to the other. It's better to call a taxi ... which is exactly what NASA plans to do once itscommercial "space taxis" are ready to fly. 
More on the space race:

If you're a Second Life user, please join me at the StellaNova Amphitheater on Saturday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT/SLT) for "From the Shuttle to Mars," a talk about the post-shuttle era presented by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. If you miss the talk, you'll still be able to listen to the full hourlong podcast via MICA's audio archives. (You'll also find links to the archived podcasts from my three previous MICA talks.)
Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."