timeline of events, help me out!

i know this is an old topic to start up again but what the heck, im bored of programming so have taken 10 mins off to come and start it up again a few months later.

What will thye timeframe be for the next few years? flights, events etc. will we realyy have any more teams in space before the end of the year? any test flights?
do your best guys, im baffled with it and trying to set dates seems to hard, hoping we will get an orbital flight before nasa run the CEV test orbital flights, or maybe have them both up there! having 2 types of spaceship in orbit, sweet as!

I doubt that there will be any crewed flights this year, although there's a chance that Armadillo may be able to put someone up, if things go right for them. Outside of Armadillo and any surprises, I would not expect to see the next round of flight testing until mid-2006. I know it's frustrating to wait this long after the excitement of the race, but that's just how things go. But by mid-2007, I would expect to see Armadillo, Rocketplane, Scaled, TGV, and perhaps Blue Origin all in the air -- although not necessarily to full suborbital altitudes yet -- and possibly others who are currently unknown quantities (such as AERA). That will be an exciting time!

As for orbital, don't count on it before 2009. Which will probably be well before the CEV, assuming the CEV doesn't become a purely commercial vehicle in any case.

hard to beleive that the other teams are realy that far behind scaled! they ma have a flying tier2 before anyone else gets their first ship! harsh!

They're not really that far behind Scaled; it's just that the economics of running a suborbital three-seater have proved to be pretty marginal, so most of them are going straight to a six-seater (or so), which naturally takes longer. In any case, I do expect to see a few teams in the air before Scaled reaches teir two, most notably Armadillo and Rocketplane.

For this year, most of my excitement will be derived from watching SpaceX's progress. I think that they are probably more important, in terms of opening the frontier, than any of the individual suborbital outfits.