I had to ask. I want to have opinions on when all of us common mortals are goins to be able benefiting from space beauties out there. I look at the astronauts and they`re the luckiest...

Will the moon be the first outpost for tourism in space other than the space station, and when, in the 21st Century, later...? Ok, enough questions.

My first time joining the forum!

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"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring".
Carl Sagan.

Welcome to the forum lightyear!!

I reckon it'll be around the mid part of the 21st century and it won't be cheap!!!

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Travel to the moon and Mars may be achievable by mid-2000 but real (interstellar) space travel is at least 150 years away provided we begin immediately.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

I think moon tourism will start in about 150-200 years, once we start building colonies over there. Mars tourism will probably start much later.

I think we could do it much sooner than that if we put our minds to it. I mean the technology for lunar tourism exists now (the fact that humans have been there is proof of that). It's just a matter of someone pumping enough money in to get it started. I don't think the moon is high on the agenda for many governments/private companies, nor is it high on the priority list for many people. Personally (and I'm going to get shot for saying this on an astronomy forum), there are many places on Earth that I'd rather visit than the Moon. I would however like to say that I've done a gig on the moon (that would look good on the resume).

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Climate Change Australia

The tourism will have to be a secondary goal. In truth, supplies and services are a much greater source of revenue. There are a series of goods which could be produced using space-based industries, we're already seeing a proliferation of space-based services (satellite TV, anyone?).

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Live long enough to see Space!

We can get to space as a species. The above link is information about life-extension (living longer) so that you can personally see a space-based civilization.

The MPrize (a prize to encourage life extension research now contains over 3 million dollars.

For space tourisum purposes, I think we will have to build a much larger space station then ISS Alpha 1. More realisticly, we will need several dozen such stations.
Each would have to be hundreds of times larger then ISS. In essance they will be cities in space. Our first real space colonies.

The Moon will likely be habbitated as well, but not likely nearly as much as what many are predicting.
I think the Moon will end up hosting factories, and being mined for materials to produce other space crafts, and the means of powering them.

I'd put a time line of 25 to 50 years before we begin to see much of this sort of activity. Unless something occurs meanwhile which substantually increases the value of space to the common greedy euntripanuers from whom such funding would have to come.

I would look for manned exploration of Mars to begin in between 15 and 20 years.
It is likely we will be extending into the asteroid belt in the same time frame.
There is a lot of mining potental in the asteroids.
Serious colonies on Mars won't likely be until near the end of this century.

Once we have proven our technologies in manned exploration of Mars, Jupiter's moons will experience a rush of exploration. We will have a small fleet of probes either at or enroute to Jupiter by 2015. I would look for serious manned exploration between 5 and 10 years after man lands on Mars.

From that point Saturn will be aimed at in proabley 2 to 5 years after the first manned mission to Jupiter's moons. It is even possible that there will be missions to both during the same time frame.
It is quite likely that by then we will have no less then a dozen space faring nations blasting off on a regular basis. Each country with it's own goals and agenda for reaching them, but there will be a lot of joint ventures as well.

I would be very surprised to see colonies on moons of Jupiter and/or Saturn in less then a hundred years, and two hundred years is proabley more likely.

We proabley won't try to do too much intersteller in less then 150 years, unless ET shows up and wants to phone home.

It is great to speculate about this topic. Basically I see three key motivations that will ultimately shape the future of manned space exploration.
The first is need. If for whatever reason we see our planet as uninhabitable then we will have no choice. With global warming and mass species extinctions now being forecast in the next 50 years, there might actually be a need to move to another star in order to start over and hopefully get it right next time. Of course we would need someplace to go, but we may get extremely lucky and find a potentially habitable planet within 10 light years or so with the Planet Finder Telescope in 10 years. Hopefully we would have time to launch a probe there to confirm it is habitable. With current nuclear technology and maybe 10? trillion dollars I am confident that we could send colonists on an interstellar mission. Of course with the low specific impule of nuclear propulsion it would take 20-40 years depending on how close to 10 light years away the star in question is. Much further than that and we simply would not be able to carry enough enriched uranium or plutonium to go any further with as big a payload as a colony ship.
A second big motivator is greed. If there is money to be made, there is always somebody (lots of them) motivated to make it happen. This would depend on technology advances in propulsion and time for those advances to become commercialized and hence cheaper. If speculation about nanotubules making it possible to build a space elevator is correct, it may become ridiculously inexpensive to park tonnage in orbit (the principal price inhibitory factor in space exploration today.) If getting to orbit became easy and inexpensive then prospecting in the solar system will happen I think in 50 years at a mind boggling accelerating pace. Absent that we are looking probably at 50-100 years for things to get started on the economic front. That is considering cheaper to-orbit systems development is funded by our country such as the promising scramjet research.
A third motivator is competition. If another nation makes headway with their space program it will stimulate the rest of the world to do so. Heaven forbid that a country have some kind of edge over another in outer space research and (military) capability there. Notice how quickly we went from orbit to the moon in the 60's when the Russians got into orbit first with plans to go to the moon. Notice how little has happened as the Russian (Soviet) economy and space program fell apart? Notice how the idea of Mars exploration and a Moon Base resurrected itself after China decided to make similar long-range plans?
All of these motivations are dependent on technology. The faster it develops in aerospace the faster greed and competition will develop. Antimatter technology is just in its infancy, but promises to significantly reduce travel times to other stars and due to its lesser weight will increase our potential range of travel. Truly exotic forms of space travel are probalby milennia away if they ever happen since they will likely require phenomenal power generation to achieve.

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