NASA wants proposals for space taxis to seed development of commercial passenger transportation service to space

On Monday the agency officials of NASA said that, NASA plans to use $50 million of federal economic stimulus funds to seed development of commercial passenger transportation service to space, agency officials said on Monday.

Astronaut Christopher Cassidy

Aspiring spaceship operators will have 45 days to submit proposals, which will be competitively evaluated. Awards for the Commercial Crew Development program are expected to be announced before the end of September.

The United States is retiring its fleet of space shuttles next year after seven more missions to complete construction of the $100 billion International Space Station, which orbits about 225 miles above Earth.

After that, the United States plans to buy rides for astronauts to and from the station from Russia, one of the 16 nations involved in the station program.

NASA is spending $500 million to help two U.S. firms, Space Exploration Technologies, a privately held company known as SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences Corp, develop rockets and capsules to deliver cargo to the station.

SpaceX's contract includes an option to upgrade its Dragon cargo ship for passenger service. The company has said it needs $300 million, most of which would be used to develop a launch escape system for the crew.

Nevertheless Musk hailed the move as a step in the right direction.

"The main thing that the public should be taking note of is that right now we are (solely dependent) on the Russians (for space transports) after 2010," he said.

The White House has convened a panel, headed by former Lockheed Martin chief Norm Augustine, to review NASA's human space program. The current plan is to finish the station next year, retire the shuttles and develop new vehicles that can travel to the space station as well as to the moon and other destinations in the solar system.

Funding for the follow-on program has been scaled back to $81.5 billion from $108 billion between 2010 and 2020, the year pegged for the first post-Apollo moon landing.

The panel, which is scheduled to make its report by August 31, also has been mulling extending the life of the space station beyond its projected shut-down date of 2015.

NASA plans to hold a workshop in Houston on Thursday for companies interested in partnering to develop commercial passenger service to space.

Firms expressing interest in the program include Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Airborne Systems, SpaceX, Boeing Co, Tether Applications, Retro Aerospace, Emergent Space Technologies, Davidson Technologies, and Paragon Space Development Corp.

The competition is only open to U.S. firms.

EBay, Tuesday GM starting car-selling trial

Hundreds of General Motors' California dealers will let consumers haggle over the prices of new cars and trucks through the eBay online marketplace under a trial that begins Tuesday.

About 225 of California's 250 GM dealers are set to take part in the program. They will be selling Buick, Chevrolet, GMC and Pontiac vehicles on cobranded Web sites through eBay Inc.'s online auto marketplace, eBay Motors, until Sept. 8. The cars will also be searchable through eBay Motors and eBay's main site.

The trial is part of Detroit-based General Motor Co.'s turnaround plan, making more official a practice some of its dealers had already participated in on their own. It expands an existing partnership covering GM certified used vehicles sold through eBay.

It also marks a shift for San Jose, Calif.-based eBay, since most of the vehicles sold on eBay Motors — a site that sells various types of vehicles and auto parts — have traditionally been used.

Starting Tuesday, eBay visitors will be able to visit Web pages like gm.ebay.com and chevy.ebay.com, where they can browse new 2008 and 2009 vehicles, ask dealers questions and figure out financing. Select 2010 models also will be available.

The cobranded sites will also include a Web tool currently on eBay Motors that helps shoppers determine if they're qualified to trade in their old car for money toward a new one under the government's just-refilled "cash-for-clunkers" stimulus program.

Car buyers will be able to choose between the two standard options currently offered on eBay Motors: Negotiating a price with a dealer through the site or purchasing right then at a fixed price. Cars will be picked up at the dealerships.

EBay Motors Vice President Rob Chesney said the companies decided to run the trial in California because there are many tech-savvy consumers there. EBay users who live outside California can contact dealers to see if they're willing to sell and ship vehicles to them, he said.

The test comes a month after GM made an unusually quick exit from bankruptcy protection with ambitions of becoming profitable and building cars people are eager to buy. Once the world's largest and most powerful automaker, new GM is now leaner, cleansed of massive debt and burdensome contracts that would have sunk it without additional federal loans.

GM CEO Fritz Henderson said in July that the company was working on an experiment that would let eBay users in California bid on vehicles or buy them at a fixed price. Dealers were to distribute the cars. At the time, no deal had been completed, though.

Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president of U.S. sales, believes that getting the auto maker directly involved in new online sales will give customers a larger sense of security about buying a car on the Web. Currently, many consumers research new cars online, but most still go down to a dealer to make the actual purchase.

He's hoping it generates more interest in GM vehicles in California — a market he said the company needs to improve in.

For eBay, the program fits in with its strategy of growing its market for goods that are still new but not necessarily the latest models. It's also a chance to get more people interested in making new, large purchases on a site whose past is steeped in the sale of hard-to-find collectibles. The sale of used cars on eBay is already proof that consumers are getting more and more comfortable buying higher-priced items online, Chesney said.

"New cars are like the next frontier of that," he said.

The companies would not give financial details of the deal, but GM spokesman John McDonald said it is an arrangement that they think will be profitable for both firms.

Inder Dosanjh, a Dublin, Calif.-based dealer who owns four GM dealerships and currently sells used cars on eBay, said the program shows GM is trying to step outside the box and find new ways to sell cars. He plans to list all his new inventory on eBay this week. 

"I think they should have done this a long time ago," he said.