In a hearing before the commission tasked with shaping NASA's exploration aims, space entrepreneurs encouraged commissioners to embrace private access-to-space efforts and contests, such as the $10 million X Prize competition to spur interest in space travel.

"The government can capture the passion of space through the entrepreneur market," said Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of ZeroGravity Corp., an effort to privatize low gravity airplane flights. Diamandis also heads the X Prize contest, which calls for teams to build their own reuseable, manned spacecraft, and lauded NASA's recent commitment to cash prizes under its Centennial Challenges program.

The commission was appointed by President George W. Bush to gather information and make suggestions on how NASA can best fulfill the space vision of returning human astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond.

This week's meeting, which concludes March 25, marked the start of the third of five sessions to be held across the country until May, when commissioners will deliver their recommendations to the President. It is being held at the Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology in Atlanta.

"Certainly the public-private partnership is going to be key to the future of NASA," said aerospace veteran Edward "Pete" Aldridge, Jr., chairman of the commission, during the hearing. Aldridge said he expects to bring at least 10 key strategies to the table when making space policy recommendations to President Bush later this year.

Some commissioners, however, cautioned that depending on private space entrepreneurs to develop new space technologies or crafts under cash prize contests could be a weight on the yoke's of NASA's mission timeline. For example, the recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-sponsored Grand Challenge to award $1 million to the first team to build a robotic rover capable of winning a desert race fizzled earlier this month when all of the entries broke down.

"The NASA vision, as it's put forth, is not a vision that has the luxury of waiting around for anyone to invent something new," said astrophysicist and commission member Neil deGrasse Tyson. "I worry about the mismatch between waiting for these prizes to be won and the timeline for these space vision missions."

While the exploration of the moon and Mars is a task better executed by NASA, where science - not profit - is the goal, private enterprises could support the agency's space efforts by providing the infrastructure will rely on in the future.

"Part of it is to commercialize those things that can be," Aldridge said. "That includes some things outside the government role, not exploration itself but the communications satellites, lunar mapping and Mars mapping spacecraft, for example."