Why now.

When President Barack Obama announced his plans to cancel future moon missions, coinciding near the time that the long-planned shuttle-program-decommission was taking effect, many among the rank and file of NASA remained skeptical.

Especially for shuttle engineers and scientists, the future of space exploration appeared murky at best, and at worst, in terrible jeopardy. Obama then called for a dramatic up-tick in NASA dollars in the federal budget (somewhere in the $8 billion range) and a long-term agenda that would send Americans to the planet Mars. "And I expect to be around to see it," the president was quoted as saying, echoing John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 call to go to the moon.

Though the shuttle's three-decade mainstay of space travel, experimentation, and exploration is indeed vanishing, there exist tremendous possibilities within the private sector to both expand on the progress made during the shuttle years and to usher in a new era of post-shuttle space flight.

Elon Musk's SpaceX venture recently successfully launched Falcon 9, the first private rocket to achieve earth orbit. In addition to privately funded, heavy-lift rockets, progress has also been reported on the space elevator front, with wirelessly-powered, ribbon-climbing robots competing for a NASA-sponsored prize, which was eventually claimed by a team whose ground-based lasers and photovoltaic cells propelled its climbing robot past 2,000 feet.

Now, more than ever, do both a uniquely-sympathetic US government and prevailing private-venture circumstances, offer opportunities for bright ideas and clever theories to couple with talented engineers and technicians to welcome a new era of human-fueled space ambitions.

I, for one, intend to seize this opportunity by allocating a substantial portion of the resources of my new start-up company Cozy Dark, toward the research, design, and development of new orbital technology. Alas, I've already said too much, as this is indeed another space race (i.e. hotly competitive), albeit private-venture oriented. Time will tell which company will help to craft the new era of the human space frontier, but one winner is already clear: the benefit of all humankind.