IF the Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral on schedule next weekend, heading for the International Space Station, its cargo will include liquid salt and pepper, tortillas and a soft drink called Tang, favoured by generations of astronauts.
More importantly, it will be carrying the hopes of a new generation of billionaire “space junkies” that private enterprise will now carry forward the torch of exploration lit by NASA and other government agencies half a century ago.
The Falcon 9 rocket, built by the internet banking pioneer Elon Musk, is poised to make history as the first private spacecraft to visit the space station 400 kilometres above Earth.
The space station has been criticised for failing to fulfil its promise of great scientific breakthroughs, but a new generation of private sector “geeks” are eager to prove that such exploration is not only scientifically valuable but also profitable.
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And most of the billions they are preparing to spend was made in Silicon Valley: Mr Musk, 40, who co-founded PayPal and sold it for $1.6 billion a decade ago, is jostling shoulders with the founders of Google, Amazon and Microsoft in his eagerness to get into space.
They all made their fortunes by turning the internet, created in the 1960s by US scientists, into a publicly accessible economic and cultural phenomenon.
Now that a cash-strapped NASA is sacking its most experienced scientists, the internet tycoons hope to pick up the talent and repeat their success in space.
Musk, who has built his SpaceX company headquarters in southern Los Angeles, near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which will supply many scientists for his future ambitions, admits he is standing on the shoulders of US tax-funded giants.
But he believes that rockets such as the 55-metre Falcon 9 will replace the now-grounded shuttle fleet because they are cheaper to operate and, though he will not say it, safer.
Many critics believe the losses of the shuttles Challenger, which broke up 73 seconds after take-off in 1986, and Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas in 2003, marked the end of the government domination of the space program.
But it has taken the rise of the internet to fund an alternative approach. The era may have begun in 2004, when SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded rocket to fly into space and return safely, but that cost more than $20 million to win the $10 million Ansari X prize.
In contrast, the Falcon 9 promises out-of-this-world profits. Mr Musk, who left his native South Africa in 1989 to avoid serving in its apartheid-era army, has won a $1.6 billion contract from NASA.
If all goes well in Florida next Saturday, and recent software glitches have been sorted out, Mr Musk's rocket will replace NASA shuttles on a dozen cargo missions to the space station. The cargo, which includes equipment to advance NASA's ambition to develop blood-cell-sized “micro-balloons” to carry anti-cancer drugs to tumours, which have to be tested in gravity-free laboratories, is carried in a capsule called the Dragon.
There are no astronauts: the Falcon 9, which has already flown into space twice, is controlled from Cape Canaveral, and the Dragon will depend on space station volunteers to unpack its half tonne of cargo.
The capsule will return to Earth and splash down in the sea, exciting those nostalgic for the Apollo missions which returned astronauts from the moon in the same fashion. “If it's not reusable, I will consider it a failure,” said Mr Musk recently. He hopes the Dragon will, in 2018, be heading for Mars - and returning too.
Mr Musk knows he is in a space race with his fellow internet billionaires. Google's founders are backing ambitious plans to mine asteroids, alongside the film director James Cameron.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is building a “space port” in Texas to win technology development contracts from NASA.
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is funding the Stratolaunch - a massive aircraft that in 2015 will carry smaller private spacecraft on the first critical leg into space.
The Stratolaunch was designed by the aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who built SpaceShipOne and is working with Sir Richard Branson on his tourist-carrying “sequel”, SpaceShipTwo, due to launch next year.
Mr Rutan, 68, said he had worked in the wilderness for 40 years, “but now the wealthy and powerful are putting their money where it should be: into the wild unknown”.
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