Future of space travel?
Future of space travel?
Hello friends, what's your opinion and idea about the future of space exploration, travel, the solutions to the hardships of space travel?
To be honest, I don’t think you’re going to see much in terms of space travel in your lifetime. We might get a small lunar outpost in our lifetimes but that is it.
Realistically speaking, most space exploration in our future will be done mostly the same as how its done today: through automated telescopes, probes and landers given instructions from Earth (and it will be a very long time before there is any serious effort to send even automated probes to locations beyond the solar system). I could see most space economic activities, such as mining, construction and satellite/station servicing, also being almost completely automated with minimal human presence, except for a few people sitting at computers monitoring it all.
The big changes in the future might be smarter automated machines that can handle doing more on their own, or even for instance machines able to do some rudimentary self-replication in order to establish an industrial presence.
Supporting Humans in Outer Space is very difficult, and years of data from the ISS have shown that lengthy human presence in microgravity is harmful to human health, not to mention that the level of background radiation exposure in deep space is much higher than it is on the surface of the Earth. We would need artificial gravity and radiation shielding to counter these, but this does not solve the other problem, which is that humans need large quantities of breathable air, water and food as the bare minimum requirements of survival in space, and this is before we get to other problems, such as people being enclosed in isolated spaces with only a handful of other people for up to years at a time.
For most of us, Earth will remain our only home for the foreseeable future.
We have the tech to colonise the solar system now. The desire to do so it what is missing.
Any thoughts of travelling to others stars within one human lifetime will always remain SF.
Can you elaborate on "We have the tech to colonise the solar system now."
There is nothing we need to invent to be able to start a permanent human presence outside near earth orbit.
Transport. Life support. Communication. etc
Wether is it something we should be devoting the level of investment required to do it when there are so many issues that need attention on earth is another matter.
I'm very excited about kinetic gun type launch tech. Its way to harsh for humans, but it could get cargo to space very cheaply. If that were true the building blocks for a huge space station suddenly become much more economically feasible.
Kinetic gun type launch is great for transporting materials from earth to within our solar system, we need methods for either the best method that is best suitable for humans to travel in space or humans must adopt to harsh traveling methods.
What would be really be a game changer in this regard is either a Space Elevator type system (which would be really difficult and expensive to build even if we did have suitable materials to do it) or a Reusable Single-Stage To Orbit rocket (even the mighty Starship rocket is two stages, so this is also very difficult to achieve).
As for actual travel in space, faster is better (both in the sense that it limits exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity, two things proven harmful to human health; and also that it reduces the need to carry a large amount of provisions onboard for a long trip), so it helps for instance to have in-orbit refuelling capability (so you can actually use your rocket engine to propel you faster) or different engines such as nuclear propulsion engines that have better performance than existing chemical rockets.