I think we'll learn more and more at even faster rates, but for the moment there's little will to do much exploration among governments who are the only people with enough money to do it. There's no real incentive for business to explore space, the X prize only works because it's about transporting people and cargo - there's a clear financial return.

As to interplanetary travel, I believe we have the propulsion concepts to do it but of course refinement is always useful. The big catch is that most propulsion technology aside from chemical rockets, which require too much weight of fuel, need large amounts of energy to reach their full potential. I've heard it said that a manned trip to Mars could be done with these drives in about 6 months to get there and back if the ship was given a compact nuclear reactor, they have them as small as a large domestic dustbin/garbage can these days. Unfortunately again nuclear reactors in space get people a little nervous because of the safety implications. Solar power is being used for these drives, they installed one on the international space station for moving away from dangerous debris and keeping its orbit stable which is powered by solar panels, but the thrust isn't enough for fast interplanetary travel. They still need fuel but compared to the space shuttle which takes thousands of tons of fuel, admittedly reaching orbit takes a lot of power all at once which chemical rockets are good for, these magnetic based drives might be able to get to Mars on a ton or so of fuel if even that much.

I did hear a couple days ago on the news they've finished some research on plant growth in space and are designing pods to grow food in space or on the moon, that's another huge factor. One pod was estimated to provide half of an astronaut's calories plus all of their oxygen and drinking water. This obviously means supply pods aren't needed so that makes space travel a lot easier.

Routine interstellar travel'll be a long time coming yet of course, though it will help if we have a colony or something for space travel to get to. It'd be a bit like setting up shipping lanes to North America before it was colonised, native peoples not withstanding.

Hi,
I believe that some sort of space mission will occur in the next hundred years, but I do wonder how much we'll learn.
indeed, safety is very important, cost, everything else everyone has said.
To me, the idea of going into space is facinating. I know this is going to branch out the topic slightly, but I did come rather close to riding in a rocket, as I have been lucky enough to have been to Florida, to Epcot in Disney World and to have ridden Mission Space, complete with a shoulder harnice and g-forces. The experience was around 4 minutes flite time, but takes a total of around 20 minutes once you're in the pre-show room.
If you ever get the chance to go there, this is unmissable, make sure you ride the "full throttle" version for the shoulder restraints and g's.
One place I'd love to go to is the kenidy space center, I'm actually wondering what sorts of experiences they have there.
Sorry for branching out the topic, but this post, for some reason, reminded me of that experience.

If we could convince a board billionaire to invest in a space program...
But convincing billionaires they have anything to gain for parting with money takes some serious skill that ... well... I don't have.

Aaron: Ah, I was trying to remember what I dreamed about last night--turns out I had a dream about riding Mission Space (I've ridden it once, but I don't remember when... shortly after it opened, I think?).
Actually, after riding spaceshot at the space center in Alabama (I went to spacecamp at the end of sixth grade), I became rather reluctant to ride the sort of themepark rides that consist solely of vertical motion at high speeds.
Also, in the ground mission on Mars simulation, I found a hexbolt and a spiderweb in the side of a rock.

Well christals is an intersting point, in fact an sf series I'm reading currently had the idea of translight communication working by sympathetic vibrations betwene identically grown crystals on an atomic level, though again, there would need to be the massive investement even to get to orbit to provide basis for such research to even start, though sattelite maintanance and manufacture in orbit is probably a more likely corperate developement, sinse effectively it's stil tied to earth and not really about exploraion.

The space program gave us graphite pencils, diapers and silly putty. More not-so-obviously-space-related things like that would be interesting.

I'm afraid I'm less convinced any of those developements would get down to a public level where individuals would use them.

What would be more likely is that such methods of food production would be bought out by some fat cat company who then use it to increase their prophits, without much of the bennifit coming to the customer sinse they'd stil be charging the same prices even if the cost of production dropped.

If we're talking about orbital researchand production, I personally would like to see more energy generation, sinse afterall a solar panel could be a lot more efficient outside earth's atmosphere.

Take for instance the idea of satellites for communication that required no batteries, fuel or anything else to run but could pretty much keep themselves going perminantly except for mechanical failures, ditto with orbital factories.

the only issue I really see in terms of production in orbit is getting stuff too and from the factory, sinse it's not particularly viable to have a factory that costs you a huge reserve in rockit fuel to get anything from, and once again, unless some sort of space elivator or launch loop system is developed I don't see this as too likely.

OK. let me throw a munkey rinch in to this. Do yall think we will ever start using solar sails. I was listen the the solar clip which can be found on Podiobooks.com and the main way that they got their ships to move was by solar sails. also, how about creating wormholes to go threw? how hard would wormhole creation be? I know that in Babylon 5 and star wars, they use hyper space to go long distences. can any of these things come in to being and how will it take shape? Is all this to far off? I can think of one reason why people may wish to leave earth. that reason may be to many people and not enough resources.

glad you found the solar clipper series Cw, it's awsome, in fact I like all of Nathan Lowel's work, and for anyone who wants to read it either look him up on www.podiobooks.com or Go here for his own site

Or, check out my media favourites in Klango, I've subscribed to his podcast there too.

getting back to space though, remember in the solar clipper series, firstly the ships never actually land on any planet, the most they do is dock with orbital stations on various worlds, and people need to get faster orbital shuttles to get to those.

Second, remember the solar sale ships there don't use their sales all the time. They stil have a fuel engine used either when they're getting up to speed or desellerating, and the sales are only used to maintain their speed once they're going fast enough.

We don't yet have that strong an engine or fuel, sinse as Cx2 said, you just couldn't work by solar sales alone.

Another interesting point is that in that series the sales themselves are not physical solar pannels, but specially generated force fields which are far more light sensative.

Unfortunately, all of these require technical developements that are thus far beyond us.

As to getting off earth, well I for one would appreciate it just to see new planets, though as I said given economics I'm doubtful whether it will happen or not.

As to orbital clean up Cx2, actually I saw an anime on that premise at one stage, it was rather fun seeing the adventures of the space dustbin men, ;D.

----- oh btw, that's garbage men to everyone in the us.q

Well, the ships in space odisy were based on the idea of developing cold fusion, ie, nuclear reactions that are safe and create no nasty waste or side effects.

Theoretically this is possible and would generate free, unlimited energy, and thus lead to the ships of 2001.

I have heard some nasty rumours that shell and other oil companies have bought out quite a bit of research into that area, though how true it is I'm not sure, however when the oil starts to run short and the price goes up we'll see.

As to solar sales, it's a while sinse I read the solar clipper series, but I believe they were used coming into system to desellerate, so that the ship stopped at the wrong place.

of course, this presumes the ship can get up to a fast enough speed in the first place.

As to whether we'll ever have ships like that, again, I'm not sure.

I'm fairly certain space travel will occur at some point in human history, but not until we have our economic and planetary situation more under control, which may not happen for another couple of hundred years.

then again, some developement happen quickly, look at the 19th century, going from nothing to steam trains electric lights and primative motor cars in scarcely 100 years.

As I said, the solar clipper series didn't use sales as propultion generally, but as a way of sustaining momentum once the ship got moving, sinse in space a litle momentum goes a long way. Obviously though, we would need to get ships moving first.

When I say the economic situation "sorted out" I don't mean completely, just enough to provide the impetus to get going.

In Ciesar's diary, there's actually a note that steam can push objects and some observations of the griek philosopher heroditus who built a steam engine, however they were never taken further simply because there was no need to develope steem power in an empire where you already had thousands of slaves to do the job anyway.

That's the sort of thing I mean.

Space exploration would take far more resources and work than one single company, or even nation could perform, thus until there is a larger group with a more united purpose, or at least a bit more cooperation betwene large parts of the world, there simply will not be the resources to even begin thinking about space exploration.

Of course as I said, this is accepting some sort of discovery in the future, rather the way Anastetics were discovered entirely by chance and yet have completely changed the idea of surgery as compared to what it was 150 years ago.

Well I will confess that part of the reason in my thousand year future timeline for human space exploration moving forward is that after the alien invasion in 2089, there is a second satellite orbiting earth with it's own artificial atmosphere, which makes it far easier to construct things in orbit and thus reach mars and other worlds.

of course, earth also has the advantage of canibalizing alien tech as well, though it's actually the citizens of Luna and the new satellite that do most of the actual work there sinse earth is pretty much in a mess at that stage, ----- and it's stil only 500 years later with the help of another group of aliens (friendly this time), that ftl travel is discovered, though all the intersystem politics in that period is rather convoluted and rather nasty.

I stil have to finish the last 500 years betwene 2442 and 3025 ;D.

Getting back to reality though, I agree on sub orbital flight, though given the amount of fossel fuel even conventional aircraft take up, I'm not convinced this will be a viable and common place option untl a reasonable alternative to oil based propultion has turned up, sinse even at the current wrate we're likely to run out of oil within at most the next 50 or 60 years.

Indeed, one quite serious academic artical I read actually said that once the fossel fuels ran out everything would go back to barbarismk, and general technology would be set back at least 200 years, though it failed to take into account the fact that running out of oil wouldn't happen over night, and by the time it became less cost effective to drill for, alternatives would be cheaper.

either way though, given the amount of fuel required to get into orbit, I can't imagine it being common place until we have something more efficient and cost effective than we do now.

Ah, fair enough on rockit fuel, I didn't realize it's generation required so few natural resources. Sinse plastics are simply various combinations of carbon and hydrogen with a few trace elements, I've actually heard about a lot of research into synthetic plastics creation using various natural materials and techniques of chemical bonding, so I'm less certain that will be such a major concern in future as simply switching over to different forms of power production.

yes, we have them now, but whether the coorporate fatcats will be able to plan things efficiently enough to alter their production methods I'm not certain.

That's why my timeline predicts the major crash in 2022, which is basically caused by a combination of the rising price of oil, the capitalist everyone for themselves atitude, and people's overall paranoyer.

The problem I can see as far as the orbital arguement goes, is suborbital flight really won't make much difference to space exploration, sinse as you said, anything would need constructing in orbit, and simply using whatever method for suborbital flight wouldn't make half as much difference to actually getting things up there or doing enough manipulation in orbit to actually create something useful such as a spacestation.