You might not know it from reading the newspapers, but a new space age is at hand, one that will be fueled as much by private corporations as by government space agencies. And by far the best place to keep tabs on the final frontier turns out to be the Web.

An array of sites, spearheaded by the new standard-bearer Space.com, now deliver up-to-the-minute news from the cosmos, giving the subject the kind of constant attention that networks and newspapers tend to reserve for big missions like John Glenn's October 1998 nostalgic return to space aboard the shuttle Discovery.

'No other medium provides both immediacy and detail. Television time is so expensive that a space shuttle launch is only worth a 30-second item on the national news,' says Terry McDonald, content editor of Space Chronicle. An offshoot of the Houston Chronicle's Web site, Space Chronicle was one of the earliest operations to fill the space-news niche online.

The online space story began in earnest with NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission in July 1997, when, for the first time since man walked on the moon 28 years earlier, audiences were able to marvel at activity taking place elsewhere in the solar system. While television was one conduit for the experience of the Mars Pathfinder, the mission proved to be a definitive moment in Internet news.

Images of the Martian landscape beamed back from Pathfinder and the robotic rover Sojourner fomented a Mars madness. Within days of its landing, a Mattel toy model of Sojourner was sold out in stores from coast to coast. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the landing (and used a rover to unveil it).

And the Web came of age as a galvanizing medium for news. NASA put together a network of sites to handle as many as 50 million hits a day -- and the agency got them. In its 30 days of operation, the site logged nearly 566 million hits; the peak came on July 8 at 47 million, the largest Internet event up to that time.

Two years later, of course, the Internet is cooking, and so is space. The first ongoing space story of truly international proportions got under way last winter with the launching of the first components of the international space station, a partnership between the United States, the European Space Agency nations, Japan, Canada, Brazil and Russia.

But space development and exploration is beginning to move away from the public sector and into the hands of capitalists. New satellite systems, such as the GlobalStar telephone network and Teledesic, a satellite Internet service provider, are poised to take flight, ushering in what Wired magazine has called 'the privately funded industrial era in space.'

In the next decade it's estimated that the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit will triple to 1,700, and that space industry revenues will more than quadruple, from $38 billion to $171 billion.

It's not easy to keep up with everything that's going on out there, but online journalism has risen to the challenge with a proliferation of space-news Web sites devoted to the world's extraterrestrial pursuits.

Like the Houston Chronicle, which has close ties to the city's Johnson Space Center (home of NASA mission control), Gannett's Florida Today also capitalizes on its own ties to the industry at Cape Canaveral with its Space Online site.

Both sites have devoted full-time editors and feature daily news updates, extensive mission reports and regular reports on the satellite industry.

But the 500-pound gorilla in this content category is clearly Space.com, which timed its debut to the 30th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing in July. The site's prominent position is deserved, although it owes much of its high media profile to CEO Lou Dobbs, who last spring left his post as CNN's lead financial journalist to launch the venture.

'One of our goals is to popularize space and make it interesting to a wide range of people,' says Space.com vice president and executive producer Charles Barthold, noting that Dobbs' interest in launching a space-news site was first piqued by Mars Pathfinder.

Space.com divides its news into science and business, the twin engines of space exploration, as well as space-related entertainment, books ('space imagined') and educational packages. It also includes 'area 51,' a section devoted to the hunt for alien life.

According to Barthold, the site uploads more than 20 stories daily and updates throughout the day as events warrant. It has 14 editorial staffers on the payroll, with bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., Cape Canaveral and Houston, and plans to add offices in Los Angeles and Europe.

Space.com would not divulge its traffic, but Barthold says that audience numbers are ahead of projections, and that the site receives 40 to 50 e-mails a day from readers. Astronomy buffs comprise 'a very avid audience out there,' he says.

CNN also has a space-news section, as do Astronomy, Astronomy Now and Sky and Telescope magazines. All offer extensive breaking news as well as sky event calendars and guides.

'Space exploration occupies a nexus of interests for a wide audience,' says McDonald. 'It combines sexy machines, heroic figures, national pride and a great sense of adventure in a way nothing else does.'

Barthold sees the subject as particularly popular online. 'Most of the hardcore space fans are Web-oriented,' he says. 'As the popularity of the Web grows, we see our audience expanding because we see space as appealing to a wide range of people.'

The space-news hungry can still find an impressive lineup of sites that feature primary material, led by the massive presence of NASA, which has spin-off sites too numerous to count. Also accounted for on the Web are the SETI institute and the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as most of the world's observatories.

'There's room for all of these Web sites because there is so much space news to cover these days and no single Web site can do it all,' says McDonald, who adds that she prioritizes all this cutting-edge coverage in an old-fashioned way: with a 'Gee Whiz Test.'

'If it impresses, inspires, or surprises me, I think our readers will enjoy it, too,' she says. 'I think the notion of space exploration hits people at a deep emotional level -- it stirs the soul to look beyond ourselves.'