Dragon capsule

Also on hand Tuesday with NASA's Bolden--and honored for its pioneering work--was SpaceX, a venture started by yet another tech entrepreneur who scored big, Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors.

SpaceX later in the week touted the progress it is making with the Dragon spacecraft, a reusable vehicle intended to carry both crews and cargo into low Earth orbit. Here, a standard cargo module is lowered into Dragon through its overhead hatch.

A little more than a year ago, NASA tapped Dragon, as well as SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle, for resupply missions to the space station, after the space shuttles go out of service at the end of 2010.

SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif., is expected to carry out at least 12 cargo flights between 2010 and 2015, toting a minimum of 20,000 kilograms to the space station.