NASA will soon — perhaps as early as this Friday but more likely later in August or early September — make its final selections for the commercial crew program.

Whichever company NASA selects will finish building a replacement for the space shuttle, which the space agency needs to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station and end an uncomfortable dependence upon Russia. I recently wrote at some length about the competition, and the three competitors Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX, here.

One of the reasons why NASA went with the commercial crew program is that it believed the competitive private sector could deliver vehicles faster and cheaper than the agency could. Now as the program matures, one intriguing question is not only who will win a piece of the $4 billion on offer to complete development of a spacecraft by 2017, but whether NASA has enough funds to support more than one bidder.

Why does competition matter?

I recently had a chance to speak with Jeff Greason, a founder of XCOR. Greason was part of NASA’s Augustine commission which wholeheartedly recommended that NASA proceed with the commercial crew competition back in 2009.

Here’s what Greason had to say about the original intent of the commercial crew program:

The point of the program was to develop a competitive industry in space transportation because moving away from a single provider is the way you get a more robust transportation capability. And we didn’t want to be in the situation of always being dependent upon a single way of getting to the space station. We saw that if done commercially and competitively it could be done for a budget NASA could actually afford. Whereas many past NASA traditional efforts have been canceled before completion because the budget was one NASA couldn’t afford. In that respect so far I think you have to declare it an unqualified success.

But to maintain that success, Greason said, NASA needs to retain competition in the program.

Whatever amount the private industry has put in, the amount of money that taxpayers have had to put in is pennies on the dollar of what it would have taken from a traditional program. So I don’t care who gets the contract. I care that there’s not just one. If there is not competitiveness in the resulting market then programmatically I don’t think it has achieved its intended end.

Does it matter whether a big traditional aerospace company, or a smaller newer company wins?

There’s nothing wrong with big companies who decide they want to compete in the commercial marketplace and there’s nothing wrong with small companies that want to compete in the commercial marketplace. This is not a club where some people have the right answer, and some people don’t have the right answer. If we as a nation want to have centrally planned kinds of results we should do central planning. And if we as a nation want to have free market kinds of results, we should have a free market. I think history shows rather clearly which of those approaches works the best. That’s what motivates me and that’s what interests me about the program.

In other words, Greason believes NASA should be encouraging and supporting as many companies as possible as it seeks to cut the cost of access to space. And to be fair, NASA officials have said that’s just what they hope to do with the commercial crew program. But whether they have the bucks to do so, we will soon see.

I was speaking to Greason in the context of a story on new space, the next part in my Adrift series. It’s unlikely to be published before mid-September, however, as much more reporting remains to be done.