What will we have accomplished in space by 2033?

There are a lot of things I’m waiting for in the long quest to turn humanity into a spacefaring civilization.  I made a list over four years ago of four things I’m waiting for, and so far we’ve accomplished one.  One is a few years away from being done, one is more than a decade away, and the other, who knows if it will be accomplished.  But I was thinking about all of this the other day, and I wondered what will we likely accomplish in the next decade.  This is what I came up with.

Suborbital tourist flights will probably be finished.

For years, the idea of suborbital tourist flights excited me and I truly thought that – even though the common folk could never afford them – they would excite the public about space.  But it took so long for these companies to get flying, that I figure the industry is DOA.  People will still fly, but instead of the expected hundreds of people a year, it will probably only be dozens.  And the next accident – especially if passengers die – will ground the entire industry.  There will still be suborbital flights for experiments, and maybe once a blue moon they’ll brave the paperwork to have a technician along with the experiments, but I expect by 2033 suborbital tourism will be in the history books.

Private space stations.

One factor against suborbital tourism will be orbital tourism.  Yes, orbital tourism will be 1,000X as expensive as suborbital tourism, but you’ll get a 10,000X greater experience.  And the best place to go for orbital tourism will be a private space station.  Now, the ISS is great, but it’s not a hotel.  It’s a stinky laboratory filled with people doing various experiments.  To really get your space tourism money’s worth, you’d want a purpose-built hotel with large windows to view the Earth and space, and sound-proof cabins to join the 200-mile-high club.

But private space stations won’t just be hotels.  Some could be other laboratories, or even new businesses.  I can easily imagine robotic tugs bringing broken satellites to a space station where astronauts fix and upgrade them before returning them to service. 

Landing on the moon.

The biggest thing that will likely happen in the next decade will be humans returning to the moon.  By 2033 there may only be two or three landings, but they might be from two different programs, which will be fantastic.  And hopefully these won’t just be flags and footprints missions, but ones that start building a permanent presence on the moon. 

Mars?

Unlike what seems to be a majority of space people, I’m not that interested in human exploration of Mars.  Yes, we’ll do it someday, but unlikely in my lifetime.  The main reason, is that I’ve long maintained that while we are 100X better prepared to go to the moon now than we were in the 1960’s, going to Mars is 200X more complicated than going to the moon.  Any rush to get a crewed mission to Mars in the next decade will, in my humble opinion, be doomed to fail.  In fact, a successful, crewed mission to Mars by 2043 is probably overly optimistic.

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So, those are my thoughts.  Do you agree or disagree with them?

Random Story – The broken window

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Many years ago, I moved into my first apartment.  It was this old house that had been split up into five or six apartments, and my apartment was the third floor.  I was excited and wanted to move everything in, but it was July and it felt like 100 degrees.  For my first trip, I didn’t have a fan or anything, but I figured I’d open the windows to get some air movement.  But when I started opening the windows, I found that the landlord had put a fresh coat of paint on the window sills, and they either hadn’t waited for the paint to fully dry before closing them, or they didn’t open them to begin with.  The windows in the living room weren’t that bad and I was able to force them open.  But when I went to force open one of the windows in the kitchen, I was able to get it open, but it jerked so fast that my elbow broke the glass and I got a cut on my arm.  For the rest of the windows, I got a screwdriver and broke the paint seal before carefully opening them.

Not only did I break a window, I found that one window in the hallway had a hole in it from before I moved in.  The next day I had to sign some papers with my landlord company, so I told them about the window with a hole in it from before I moved in, and the one window I accidently broke.  They said they’d have someone around to fix them.

The window in the kitchen wasn’t one pane of glass, but rather nine small panes and one of them was what I broke.  A couple of weeks or a month after I moved in, a guy came out to measure the pane to replace it.  And then nothing happened.

That winter, I noticed when I sat in the living room that a draft came the hallway window with a hole in it.  To seal it off I cut the side out of a cereal box and taped it over the hole.  Sometime in early spring, one of the landlords was looking at the house, and saw my taped over hole and figured that wasn’t a good look for the property since it was on the side facing the street, so somebody came out and replaced the hallway window.  So the window that was broken when I moved in was finally fixed, it just took about eight months. 

As to the kitchen window, I think when the guy fixed the hallway window, I pointed out the kitchen window, and he came back one day to remove the shards from the broken pane and measure it to get the right size.  And then nothing happened.

I only stayed in that apartment for a year, but I had broken a window on the day I moved in, told the landlord about it the next day, had it measured to be replaced, twice, but it was still broken the day I moved out.  Fortunately, I wasn’t billed for any repairs.  In the following years, I had two other apartments in the same general area, but I never went through that company again.