LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Ten years after the completion of the Ansari X Prize appeared to open a new era of commercial human spaceflight, company executives and government officials at a commercial space conference expressed a mixture of optimism about the future of the industry and impatience at the perceived lack of progress over the last decade.

“I’m actually quite frustrated with the pace of commercial space,” said Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy for Blue Origin, the privately funded spaceflight company led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

“It really has been frustrating to be 10 years into commercial space, 10 years from the X Prize, and not see a proliferation of activity, of people flying regularly,” he said in a presentation at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) here Oct. 15. Read more