Well, so far we've seen a fair amount of success on the part of SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and others in filling some of the void made by the Space Shuttle retirement. The COTS program I think will quickly pay for itself, I believe, and NASA can focus more of its funding on exploration missions rather than playing the role of orbital truckers. And it won't be too long before these other companies take up the role of orbital taxi, too, freeing us from dependence on the Russians to reach the ISS. SpaceX is scheduled to do a test of the pad abort system of their DragonRider capsule (human rated version of the Dragon) this December. An in-flight abort test will follow some time next year.