The Next Fifty Years in Space

2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Age, agreed by most to have begun with the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, on October 4th, 1957. While some are taking stock of the last fifty years of space exploration, noting what has been accomplished and, more importantly, what has not been accomplished, others are wondering what the next fifty years might bring. And therein lays the problem.

What is accomplished and what is not accomplished in space, at least by the public sector, is affected by the vagaries of politics and the changing priorities of political players. These things can barely be forecasted year by year, not to mention over decades. Thrown into that mix is the private sector, a factor that was never imagined in 1957. What sort of space related markets will arise and how private companies will respond can barely be guessed at. Finally, tying the two together, what will be the relationship between the private and public sectors? Will that relationship be amicable or mutually hostile or somewhere in between? Technology can advance in strange and unexpected directions as well.

Still, if one makes certain assumptions, one can come up with a plausible scenario of what might happen in space over the next fifty years. The following, being just such a scenario, is not an absolute prediction of what will happen, but rather what might happen. In a way it can be considered a hope for what should happen.

It is October 4^th, 2057...

A debate is raging over what is the most significant development in space for the past decade leading up to the hundredth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. Some point to the expedition to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, which is still ongoing as a crew of ten explore that world's methane lakes and other wonders. Others, though, point to the establishment of a private, interplanetary transportation industry, servicing both the Mars colony and asteroid mines.

The Titan Expedition is the event being most covered by the newsnets. The excitement of the departure from Low Earth Orbit three years before, the arrival in the Saturn system and the landing on Titan about a year later has faded a little. Various activities and discoveries of the expedition are still covered, particularly in the niche services covering science and space, but not with top of the news excitement. Three years from now, barring the unforeseen, the Titan Expedition will lift off from Titan and return to Earth sometime in the early 2060s.

In the meantime, the first privately built, privately operated interplanetary space liners have been operating between the Earth and Mars and both worlds and certain asteroids for almost ten years. Most people taking the two to three month trip to Mars are contract workers doing a five year stint at the Mars colony. But a few, and the number is growing, are settlers, going to Mars with no intention of ever returning to Earth. The population of Mars is about three hundred at any one time, two hundred and fifty or so working five year contracts, fifty as permanent settlers.

A number of groups on Earth are in various stages of planning to relocate to Mars to become autonomous communities. These groups are motivated by ideology, religion, and even a desire to preserve some form of culture that they cherish. They plan to pool their resources and relocate to what they dream is a better life on a new world.

There is a great debate concerning Mars that is consuming both decision makers and the populace at large of two worlds. Advances in a number of technologies, including nanotechnology, have made scientists confident that Mars could be terraformed in about fifty years. By the early years of the next century, Mars could once again be a green world, with flowing streams, oceans, fields, and forests, where the children of men can walk unprotected under an alien sky.

One faction, made up of scientists, environmentalists, and their supporters want Mars to be kept in a pristine condition, as a living (the word used advisedly as not even bacteria has been found in twenty five years of human presence on Mars) laboratory. But a second faction, including the growing number of permanent settlers, wants life to be brought to Mars to make it a second home from humankind. There is talk of a referendum, since not even the various space faring governments can agree,

Closer to Earth, the Moon is the venue to an even larger thriving settlement. Two thousand scientists, engineers, businessmen, and others live on the Moon, primarily at Port Armstrong at the Lunar South Pole. The main export of the lunar settlement is helium 3, which fuels the burgeoning fusion power industry on Earth. Lunar mining also provides raw material to low Earth orbit industries.

Another industry is tourism. Every few weeks a pressurized lunar bus departs from Port Armstrong and rolls down a roughly hewed road north for a several day long trip to two or three of the Apollo Moon landing sites near the lunar equator. Five or six well heeled travelers pay five million dollar a piece to go on a curious kind or pilgrimage. They get out of the pressurized bus, which doubles as a kind of home away from home, walk up to a pre designated spot at the edge of each landing site, take pictures, grab a souvenir soil sample or two, and marvel.

Robotic explorers have already crossed and recrossed much of the solar system, from sun baked Mercury, to the outer reaches of the Oort Cloud. Within the next few years, the first robotic probe to cross the interstellar depths to another Solar System will be launched. Its voyage will take decades, but at the end, if the lunar far side observatory is correct, it will examine an Earth-like world orbiting another star.

Closer to Earth, orbiting space platforms, ranging from human tended micro gravity factories, to space resorts, soar along low Earth orbit. A sharp observer, looking primarily at the equatorial area of the Pacific, can see ribbons rising from off shore platforms, stretching to a point 35,786 kilometers high where they end at a space station. From those space stations, travelers usually proceed on their way to other destinations beyond Earth.

The space elevators, isolated as they are in the Pacific, are the most heavily guarded facilities on Earth. Fifty years from now, civilization is still beset with terrorism of one sort or another. The dream of a few and the nightmare of everyone else is to see one of those space elevators brought down in a terrorist action, wrecking untold havoc.

The vast majority of people traveling to and from space travel on the space elevators, much like the majority of the people traveling to the American West in the 1800s took the transcontinental railroad. It's about a two day trip to the end of the line at the terminus space station. From there ships can take a passenger to another space station within a day or two, the Moon in three days, Earth approaching asteroids in a matter of weeks to months, and Mars in about three months. Those who want to get to low Earth orbit quicker can still take a rocket shuttle from one of the many space ports, but will pay a premium for a ticket.

How does the situation just described effect the lives of ordinary people still living on Earth? Doubtless the technology created in the previous fifty years because of the various space efforts, both public and private, have enriched the quality of life of most people in ways that would seem unimaginable as this article is being read.

People living near the middle of the 21^st Century are not concerned with a subject that is a great source of worry and debate for people of our time. Energy to power technological civilization exists in abundance. Fusion power plants, powered by helium 3 mined on the Moon, are popping up like mushrooms, replacing fossil fuel and even nuclear plants. Added to wind, solar, nuclear, and space based solar, the fusion economy is one of energy profusion.

The most profound change wrought by the advent of a space faring civilization is an intangible one. For most of human history, the realm of human endeavor had boundaries around it. There was only one world and, as transportation improved, it had started to shrink drastically in the last century. Even as the space age had begun a century before, the Earth was starting to seem cramped, fragile, and crowded.

No longer. The realm of human endeavor is now as wide as the stars, filled with opportunity and promise. It is not an abstract development, but one that has affected real lives all over the once single planet of humankind.