In the last 60 years we’ve gone from Russia’s Sputnik to President Trump’s Space Force. In the next 60 years we’ll go … who knows where? If the past is any guide, predictions about the distant future are fun but have a tendency to overestimate the pace of technology, while also failing to imagine truly revolutionary developments.
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Take the classic 1968 motion picture “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which envisioned that by the turn of the century space travel would have progressed to the point where Pan Am (the now-defunct airline) would be making routine trips to a moon base, and giant Ferris wheel-like space stations would be a pit stop en route to Jupiter.
Or the first “Back to the Future” sequel, in which Marty McFly travels from 1985 to 2015 to discover a world of flying cars, hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers.
But some predictions are uncannily accurate, such as when science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted in 1964 something that sounds a lot like the internet.
“It will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”
In the movie 2001, based on Clarke’s collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick, astronauts watch a news broadcast on a flat tablet that looks suspiciously like an iPad, and make video phone calls that resemble Skype, which arrived on the scene in 2003.
“Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation,” Clarke acknowledged in that 1964 BBC broadcast. “The only thing we can be sure of about the future,” he added, “is that it will be absolutely fantastic.”
So with that, here are some “absolutely fantastic” things that should be commonplace over the next 60 years of NASA:
Space tourism
This one is easy, given that three companies already are developing plans to put sightseers in space: Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Musk’s company has already announced it plans to make a Japanese billionaire the first private passenger to fly around the moon, even though it does not yet have spacecraft capable of making the voyage.
But 60 years from now, boarding a spacecraft should be as easy as getting on an airliner today, easier if the successor to the Transportation Security Administration has more travel-friendly technology as well.
“It’s not a flight of wild imagination to see that we will have a common human access to space inside the next 60 years of an accessible basis, much akin to what we see for commercial aviation today,” says Sean O’Keefe, a former NASA administrator. “It’s just taking the same exact pattern of what we see in the ubiquitous accessible nature of commercial aviation today relative to what it was in the 1950s and ’60s.”
“I think space tourism will be as common as going on a cruise ship,” says Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Moon Base Alpha
Private citizens may have easy access to space, but where will they go? “Much of this tourism will be for trips out to the moon and back, with some landing on the surface,” Harrison said.
The moon seems the most likely destination with last year’s signing of Space Policy Directive-1 by President Trump.
“It is now the official policy of the United States of America that we will return to the moon, put Americans on Mars, and once again explore the farthest depths of outer space,” said Vice President Mike Pence in an August speech at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
A debate is raging over whether to skip the moon and go straight to Mars, but by 2078 that should be old news and some sort of base established on the moon to conduct research will serve as a way station to the stars.
“This time we’re not content with just leaving behind footprints, or even to leave at all,” Pence said, saying the time has come “to establish a permanent presence around and on the moon.”
Bye-Bye ISS, Hello LOP-G
The International Space Station, technological wonder that it is, probably has another 10 or 15 years of life in it, before it’s replaced with a more modern station with more capabilities.
While the ISS primarily studies the Earth, its replacement will look more to the stars and what’s known as cislunar space, the space between the Earth and the moon.
NASA plans to build what it calls the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway to explore the moon and its resources and ultimately assist in the first human missions to Mars.
NASA hopes to launch the space station in 2022. It will have a prototype of an advanced high-power solar electric propulsion system that will maintain its position and can move the gateway between lunar orbits as needed.
Colonization of Mars
The 2015 movie “The Martian” is often hailed as one of Hollywood’s the most realistic portrayals of space travel in the near future, even if nitpickers complain it got a few things wrong, such as the depiction of Mars’ gravity, and powerful winds that are not possible given the red planet’s lack of substantial atmosphere.
But what the movie does depict accurately is that Mars is well within range of human spaceflight, and can be reached in about nine months with current propulsion technology during the ideal launch window, when the two planets line up.
Colonization of Mars also holds the potential of being a source of mineral wealth and even water for fuel.
“By 2078 I think we will have a continuous human presence on both the moon and Mars. Moon activities will be more commercial in nature by then, but human activities on Mars will still be centered around science and exploration with minimal commercial activities,” Harrison said.
Mining asteroids, ending war.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicts the first trillionaire will be the person who figures out how to successfully exploit the resources of space, including the harnessing the energy of the sun and mining vast stories of precious minerals found in asteroids that orbit the sun.
“Gold iridium, platinum, osmium, all of these are unlimited supply in space,” said Tyson, who argues the mineral wealth of the heavens might not only make some people rich, but could also help end wars, which he argues are often fought over scarce resources.
“So here’s a thought. Here’s like a peaceful thought,” he told the Washington Examiner. “If space has unlimited resources of the kind that on Earth are limited, then that could be the removal of an entire category of conflict that our species has brought to bear on itself. So it might be the greatest move toward peace that has ever happened in the history of our species.”
“I think by that time there will be significant economic activity going on in cislunar space,” Harrison said. “I would expect to see numerous mining outposts on the moon to produce water — which can be decomposed into spacecraft propellant — and precious metals, and there will be routine mining operations on near-Earth asteroids. We may also see large-scale solar power production facilities in space that enable large-scale manufacturing operations using materials mined from celestial bodies.”
Space Force 2078
Regardless of whether Congress approves a Space Force in next year’s budget, there will be an increasing need for one in the coming decades as our reliance on satellites and other space-based systems increase.
O’Keefe doesn’t foresee “Star Wars”-type battles in space, with X-wing fighters blasting TIE fighters with directed-energy weapons, but since space has been militarized pretty much since the first spy satellite was launched, the U.S. will need a force to defend and deter terrestrial adversaries from targeting our space infrastructure.
Harrison predicts the increase in economic activity in space will undoubtedly lead to political conflict.
“Current laws, treaties, and other international agreements don’t adequately account for things like in-space mining, manufacturing, and tourism,” he said. “If countries on Earth don’t create a fair and sustainable governance structure for deep space activities, we may see nations try to claim territory on other celestial bodies or cut off key strategic points in space.”
Tyson would like to see the future Space Force be tasked with another mission: protecting the Earth from an asteroid strike like the one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
His ideas include blowing up the asteroid, redirecting it with rockets, or even painting one side black so that side absorbs more energy from the sun causing the asteroid to alter is trajectory.
Interplanetary space travel
The real challenge comes when humans try to boldly go deeper into space, and seek out new worlds.
It’s unlikely that in the next 60 years scientists will have solved the two biggest problems with human travel into deep space. The first is the lack of a propulsion system that can move a spaceship in a straight line, and the second is the ability to keep humans alive for extended space flights.
“Only in Hollywood do you have the capability to power any spacecraft in a direction you want it to go, and then have it deviate from that direction,” O’Keefe said.
A renewable source of propulsion would mean no longer having to use gravity as a slingshot to throw an object into space.
“That means we finally slipped the bonds of the laws of physics,” he said. “You’re no longer having to rely exclusively on Einstein’s principles of getting anywhere by doing things based on a gravitational condition where you’re traveling five, six, seven times the actual distance in order to get from here to somewhere else in a straight line.”
But even with faster travel, the enormous distances of space would mean any trip beyond our solar system would take longer than the average human lifespan.
Science fiction solves this problem by having the human crewmembers hibernate in some sort of cryogenic sleeping pods, but don’t expect that technology to be around in 60 years.
Aliens arrive
The plot of many a sci-fi thriller is the arrival of advanced aliens from another galaxy.
And scientists argue that with the almost infinite number of planets in the universe it’s inconceivable that our tiny flyspeck of a planet is the only one that gave birth to intelligent life.
“The very quest of exploration is the objective to scrape the last crumb off the plate of human arrogance,” O’Keefe said he remembers one NASA scientist telling him. “The very idea that we’re it in this universe and that there is nothing else like Earth anywhere in this vast expanse of space is the most arrogant assumption that we could ever reach.”
Tyson says if aliens do show up in the next 60 years, they will no doubt be far more technologically advanced than we are.
“If they treat us the way we treat one another, then they will completely exploit us, enslave us, put us on reservations, slaughter us. They will have their way with us, if they treat us the way we humans have treated each other in the history of civilization,” he said in a recent NPR interview. “So we should hope that they are kinder and gentler than we are in dealing with us.”
