Several firms think they can make money in space and are close enough to Musk’s company to practically surf in his spaceship’s rocket-fueled wake. There are now more companies looking to make money in orbit — at least eight — than major U.S. airlines still flying.

Private space companies have talked for years about ferrying goods and astronauts for NASA, but this is the first time one is actually in orbit and about to make a delivery for the space agency.

“Dragon is not the only entrant in commercial cargo,” said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace, which specializes in the also busy suborbital marketplace. “They have competitors nipping at their heels.”

Still, Dragon’s launch is “the spark that will ignite a flourishing commercial spaceflight marketplace,” said Michael Lopez-Alegria, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and a former astronaut.

Hiring Musk’s SpaceX and other private companies is a key part of NASA’s plan to shift focus. Instead of routine flights to the space station with the now retired space shuttles, NASA is aiming further out to places like asteroids and Mars. After this test flight, SpaceX has a contract with NASA for a dozen delivery runs.

The idea is to “let private industry do what it does best and let NASA tackle the challenging task of pushing the boundary further,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said last week.

NASA has given seed money and contracts to several companies to push them on their way. But eventually, space missions could launch, dock to a private space station or hotel and return to Earth and not have anything to do with NASA or any other country’s space agency.

Earlier this month, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX signed an agreement with Bigelow Aerospace of Nevada which is designing inflatable space stations for research and maybe even tourists. SpaceX and other companies will provide the transportation — like airlines — and Bigelow the place to stay. There are already eight different licensed spaceports in the U.S. where companies can launch from and most of them have no connection to NASA.

Another space launch-and-tourism company, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is working separately from NASA and the space station.

If NASA isn’t involved, there is one federal agency that is. The Federal Aviation Administration has a commercial space office that licenses private space missions and works with NASA to set safety standards.

An update on some of the closest competitors to SpaceX:

— Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., is in the cargo-only business, but it is closest to launch. It has a NASA contract for $1.9 billion for eight cargo flights to the space station once its rockets succeed. The early versions of its Antares rocket and Cygnus spaceship are already built, but the company is waiting for its launch pad to be finished at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. A stay-on-the-ground test is aimed for late July, a launch test in the fall and trial run to the space station around November, said spokesman Barron Beneski.

— Alliant Techsystems, headquartered in Arlington, Va., isn’t funded by NASA’s commercial space program, but has developed the Liberty rocket and passenger spacecraft system. Most of the rocketry and capsule systems have been tested. A key structural test of the rocket’s second stage is scheduled for early July, with the first unmanned test flight in 2014. Tests with a private crew aboard would be in 2015 and it would be ready to ferry NASA material and astronauts in 2016, according to Kent Rominger, a former astronaut and Liberty’s program manager.

— Boeing Co. of Chicago has nearly $113 million in NASA commercial crew funding and just finished its second parachute drop test in the Nevada desert. It has completed 46 of 52 milestones needed before flights, spokeswoman Susan Wells said. A landing airbag test is targeted for the fall. The Boeing space capsule, called a CST-100, will carry astronauts and cargo with three test launches aimed for 2015 and 2016, the last one with a crew on board.

— The Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., with nearly $106 million from NASA, is building a mini-shuttle crew vehicle called Dream Chaser with a first flight targeted for 2016 or possibly 2017. The company this year finished landing gear tests and has a full-scale ship for flight testing attached to a helicopter this fall in California.

— The most secretive of the companies, Blue Origin of Kent, Wash., is run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and has received $22 million from NASA. Its crew and cargo vehicle, called New Shepard, would also take tourists to suborbit. Its shell passed wind tunnel tests and its engines are now being test fired at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

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Online:

NASA commercial program: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/index.html

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

Shrake was an engineer who designed spaceship control instruments for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. After he died in 2007, his family decided that space would be a nice place to send some of his ashes so they spent a few thousand dollars to launch them in space with the Texas-based firm Celestis Inc. His daughter, Robin Smith of Grapevine, Texas, got up very early Tuesday to watch the pre-dawn launch, and said it was fitting.

“I thought wow, he was actually up in the sky, in the place where his work is being used,” Smith said by telephone.

The ashes were in a special container that was in the second stage of the Falcon rocket that boosted a capsule full of supplies for the International Space Station. That section of the rocket was jettisoned about 10 minutes after launch. It will remain in orbit for about a year then burn up as it returns to Earth.

You don’t have to be in the space business to have your ashes deposited in orbit, but you do have to have nearly $3,000. Some of what Celestis calls “participants” in this flight, which the company called its “new frontier” mission, have no connection to space.

Some people’s ashes that flew Tuesday, including those of Doohan and Cooper, were also on a botched 2008 SpaceX launch that didn’t get the remains into orbit and dropped into the Pacific Ocean. This is a makeup flight for them.

Others whose ashes have flown previously include “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his actress-wife Majel Barrett, who was in the series.

Smith said her father — ever the frugal engineer — might have thought this a waste of money, but his family is glad they did it: “Most of his career dealt with outer space and orbit and now he’s in it.”

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Online:

List: http://www.celestis.com/memorial/newfrontier/

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

In an eight page bid solicitation, the agency in charge of weather, climate and oceans said it wanted to use the emotional intelligence techniques of a prominent Harvard professor who has written five books, but misspelled his name.

The posting came weeks after the General Services Administration was embroiled in a scandal involving a Las Vegas conference that cost nearly $1 million and included a mind-reader.

Congressmen and senators called NOAA’s plans frivolous and ridiculous. House Science Committee Chairman Ralph Hall, R-Tex., gave NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco a week to come up with an explanation and details about past spending on magicians and comedians.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., in a statement, said “this is a low point even by Washington’s standards” and added that “the best magic that NOAA could perform would be to make this wasteful spending disappear.”

His wish was granted.

After NOAA’s notice was reported by Government Executive magazine, the agency cancelled the magic gig. An agency spokesman said NOAA’s top lawyer is looking into the plans. The agency did not respond to questions asking the reasoning, the cost of the proposed hiring, or if anyone in the agency would be punished.

“No speakers have been hired or confirmed for this training session,” NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen wrote in an email.

The advertisement for the magician sounded like they were trying to hire a specific person, said Steve Ellis, vice president for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. He said what makes NOAA’s plans so surprising is that someone thought about hiring a magician after the GSA scandal raised people’s awareness about silly conference spending.

“It gets filed under ‘What were they thinking’?” Ellis said. “It boggles the mind that somebody thought that this would pass the laugh test of the public.”

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Online:

NOAA: www.noaa.gov

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Seth Borenstein be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

“‘Glacial pace’ is not slow anymore,” said study author Twila Moon, a glacier researcher at the University of Washington.

At the same time, “some of the worst-case possibilities that we had imagined are not coming true at this point,” Moon said. “So it’s not good news, but it’s not bad news.”

The scientists relied on a comprehensive satellite-based survey of about 200 glaciers to make their calculations. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Science.

Compared to some past research the findings are somewhat reassuring. A 2008 study had suggested a worst-case scenario that indicated Greenland’s glaciers might contribute up to 19 inches of sea rise by the end of the century.

The glaciers have been melting under warmer summer temperatures in Greenland that on average are up by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) over the last decade, study authors said.

One famous glacier on northwestern Greenland called Jakobshavn is now losing ice at a particularly fast pace of 7 miles (11.3 kilometers) per year. That means an ice loss of nearly 3 feet (1 meter) of ice every hour. If you stare at the glacier for about 20 minutes you can notice it move, said University of California Irvine glacier expert Eric Rignot, who wasn’t part of the study.

Even so, that pace doesn’t match the predictions laid out in the worst-case laid out in the 2008 study, research that caused alarm about the effects of increasing greenhouse gas emissions that warm the earth.

“We’re not seeing some kind of runaway effect,” said study co-author, Ian Joughin, another University of Washington glacier scientist.

Rignot said it is unfair to compare this recent study to the more alarming 2008 one, which he said wasn’t designed to be overly realistic. However, he noted that the findings of this new study still exceed computer models and projections by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist, called the new work a “valuable study that advances our understanding of a very complex wild card of sea level rise.”

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Online:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

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Seth Borenstein be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears