New Space crazyness, or the day private space returned from the dead

So a few weeks back I saw this:
Bigelow plans to build Orion Lite

So I says to myself, "self, now we got some action again in private manned orbital space." I'll put it this way, when Robert Bigelow says he's going to build a spaceship, it may as well already be flying. And finally somebody decided to trim the fat from the one piece of Orion that make sense from start to finish. Don't get me wrong, I like Ares I and V, but their blueprints have a lot of red ink and so do their balance sheets. Orion just works. But it was designed to take us a few paces down the road from orbit to the moon. We don't need that kind of overhead for orbital work, and Lock Mart doesn't need their test capsules. So Bigelow being what Bigelow is, decided it was a nice ready made near in-house solution to their transportation woes. What's better, they're flying it on already tested and flying rockets. Needless to say, I was pretty excited.

Then I see:
Excalibur Almaz set to launch decomissioned Russian space capsules and space stations by 2013.
The famed Salyut station program has been mothballed then revived by another opportunistic person bent on sending us to the stars. Of course, as they were a top secret military intelligence program (complete with weapon systems) there's a few pieces that need some work from an acetylene torch, including functional weapon systems. But these babies come out of the box ready to fly, which gives EA plenty of lead time to back engineer them and make more. What's more is that unlike Bigelow, who has to cobble together two entirely separate NASA spruce geese, Almaz does the road and the destination all in one package. Anyone speak Russian?

Okay, now I'm starting to feel a little light-headed. We've gone from only one serious space company with real plans to fly an orbital design to three, two with serious reputations and a third with already proven hardware. So I figured the news reels would taper off and we wouldn't hear a peep until the Falcon 9 flies later this year.

But it would appear that now that Bigelow and Almaz have bought in the game, private space has gone all in:
Interorbital Systems plans to fly a manned orbital capsule by 2011.
Orbital Sciences plans Cygnus-based crewed capsule.

!!!!!!!! Am I awake? Am I dead? Did I miss something?

Okay, background here:
Orbital Sciences is the one and only private company to have built their own orbital rockets without direct government support prior to SpaceX. Orbital has been flying for decades and has a flight record that gives congress buyer's remorse over everything but the Saturn V. They also happen to be the only other firm with a current COTS agreement with NASA. But they were only cargo. Suffice it to say I was saddened to hear that Rocketplane Kistler's potentially manned but budgetarily doomed capsule was to be replaced by a less-than-inspiring cargo-only option by a coalition of Big Aerospace and Orbital. In fact I felt the only silver lining to me was that when NASA threw a few billion worth of contracted flights at SpaceX and Orbital, they chipped in the lion's share to SpaceX. Orbital, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. Can you ever forgive me?

As for Interorbital, these guys (and gals) were one of the multitude wildcard organizations. They have flying hardware in the form of sounding rockets (they go to orbital altitudes, but not on orbital trajectories. In other words, anything going up will be back in the lab by nightfall.). They have paying customers, mostly climate science studies and the like. And they had tantalizing bits and pieces of manned orbital plans including some really inspiring pieces about going to the moon. But in New Space who doesn't. Vaporware is the name of the game, and I don't even open blogs on my reading list unless there's a whiff of real hardware in the subject. I contacted IOS to try to get some details, but after one response suggesting I'd get some answers, the trail went cold (that's as much if not more to do with me as with IOS). Frankly, I wasn't even sure if IOS was even still in operation. Then just when I was about to move them from the Lost and Found to the Obituaries there comes this gem that puts them in line to be not just another manned orbital provider, but the second in line, probably even the first since Dragon has a 3-year development time before Manned Dragon is airborne. Granted, it's a two seater, which isn't as headline grabbing as Dragon's 6-7 capacity, and there's no word of when they move beyond a 12-hour test flight to heading to an actual destination. But man, I'm glad to see them back on the rolls. In my time maintaining the list of private spaceflight companies on wikipedia, I always thought IOS was our last and best chance for real competition to SpaceX in the field. And man, am I not disappointed. Oh yeah, and unlike the other players in the field, even SpaceX and Bigelow, IOS's astronauts have names.

None of these are suprises to me, names wise.  They've been phantoms that occasionally crop up on the space news wires from time to time to remind all us geeks that they are still there.  But this, this is unprecedented.

I was going to say I'm speechless, but I believe I've substantially disproven that at this point.