I only crudely stenographed it yesterday, and didn’t really comment, though others did. But Alan Boyle has the story. It’s a good description of the current state of play, but I don’t necessarily agree with this:

Theoretically, NASA would not have any formal say over the flight of a Boeing CST-100 space capsule that’s launched on an Atlas 5, heading for a Bigelow Aerospace orbital module. But because NASA is expected to be the biggest customer by far for orbital spaceflight services, the space agency would probably play a key role in the development of any private-sector orbital spacecraft developed in the U.S., even if that craft ended up occasionally going someplace other than the International Space Station. Pragmatically speaking, it’s likely that NASA would be to spaceflight standards what California is to auto emission standards, or Texas is to school textbook standards.

“Expected” by whom? I don’t expect that beyond the next five years or so, though I’m sure it’s an accurate reflection of the conventional wisdom. I think that Bigelow-induced traffic will be far greater than NASA’s needs. I also think that if SpaceX does get to full reusability it will both drop launch costs in itself, but that SpaceX’s success will draw competitors into the market to further reduce costs. At that point, NASA’s standards will become largely irrelevant, because one of the ways that people will compete on cost (and safety and availability) will be to ignore them when they don’t make sense.