That's a good question. While we've obliquely addressed SpaceX, we think that with a robust institutional program ongoing there are not the same drivers for NASA to run a COTS development program in the same time period. A lot of early COTS can be traced back to contracts given out as a part of SLI, which doesn't happen here. Part of the reason is that NASA is busy with getting the station 'finished' and keeping the Minerva program going, NASA institutional focus is going in a different direction in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While there is going to be some support in the 1990s for smaller vehicles like Pegasus and Conestoga, with two large vehicles in the pipeline (Altas III and Heimdall), NASA has no interest in supporting the development of a third vehicle into that class. By the time they might have interest, NASA is going to start looking toward the replacement of the Orbiter fleet. A good paper on the life NASA expected to get out of the fleet can be found
here, in this September 2000 presentation.
This is always an issue with any "NASA does better" timeline because as an institution NASA, (and frankly the majority of other Space Agencies) will always have little incentive to support someone else playing in their sandbox. TTL NASA also has less reason to be defensive and defer to public/political pressure to 'open' access to space. The ARE supporting and using 'commercial' services and launches (as is the DoD in context) with Atlas III and Heimdal. Simply put at this point in time with all that's going on the perception and theory would be that anyone who can at a minimum match the performance, safety, and costs of the latter two LV's is welcome to jump into the game and 'compete' for launch contracts. While the DoD may kick some money and contracts towards 'alternate' launch vehicles of some types, (I'm willing to bet that "On-Demand-Launch" will still be a thing TTL and therefore get some funding for small launch vehicles) NASA obviously isn't going to have the budget to spare nor much incentive.
Politically there isn't much incentive either because Congress TTL has gone all-in on supporting SS-Enterprise and a return to the Moon already. Those also give them an excuse to delay Mars planning and operations due to the cost and time overruns. Coupled with the likely at least two economic 'downturns' that have happened in the background by the TTL year of 2017 and it's very likely that there is no efforts left in the US to develop strictly "commercial" space flight.
Any such would have to directly compete with the Shuttle, Shuttle-C, Atlas III, and Heimdal along with Soyuz or Ariane-launched Kepler's from Europe and maybe even Chinese launch services. There may be some demand for suborbital tourism as per OTL but in the face of the obvious "progress" NASA-et-al are making any significant delay, (such as we've seen OTL) is going to quickly lead to disappointment and backlash so anyone investing and pushing such efforts would have to greatly increase both their input and development effort. (If they are not flying a regular scheduled service by this point then they will be considered a scam and lose all public trust and attention) The DoD may kick some funding towards some of these efforts in a very low-key and general way, (lets face it some 'might' have applications the military might be interested in) but for the most part like many projects OTL, (Pegasus, QuickReach, FALCON in general, etc) the overall funding and effort is not likely to result in an operational vehicle or system.
On the gripping hand, a big legacy of Space Station Enterprise is that while "wet-lab" on-orbit structures are going to require a lot of expensive on-orbit labor, they have at least been 'proven' and also shown to be expandable in the future. In context that means the "pitch" for something like an ET derived commercial Space Station is a lot less of an uphill battle than it was OTL. And some of the more 'conservative'
concepts were not that terribly difficult or expensive when you consider you have the Shuttle-C stack to launch them, and experience with SS-Enterprise to model things on.
Aka: A Shuttle-C launch puts an "ET-based-dry-Hab" with an attached Aft Cargo Carrier docking and transfer hab/hub (page 51, 52, 53) and an M/T External Tank into orbit in a single launch as the basis of a commercial space station and you have just cut out about two-thirds of the operational and budgetary as well as institutional (NASA resistance) issues such concepts face that make investors nervous. If you're clever in fact, (and lets face it even if no one initially is there will be someone to point out the 'obvious'
) NASA-et-al may even kick in some money and support if you pitch it right.
So all is not "lost" in the realm of commercial space we just have to adjust to consider where such focus might be in this context
Randy