What The Next Decade In Space Exploration Will Look Like

This past year in July marked 50 years since man first stepped on the moon when Apollo 11 successfully landed on the lunar surface on July 16th of 1969. It was at this moment that we heard Neil Armstrong utter those famous words, and change history forever. As we celebrate this momentous occasion, it begs the question as to what can we expect the next coming decades in space to look like. To date, only 571 people in the history of the world have ever made it into orbit. And since 1972, no one has ventured much further into space than Des Moines, Iowa is from Chicago, Illinois, which represents roughly the altitude of the International Space Station from the surface of the earth. However, the next few decades in space are slated to look very different With falling costs, new technologies, and other nations entering the landscape, such as China and India, the pace of advancement is going to increase dramatically. There is also a whole generation of entrepreneurs and companies that have come about such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic that are promising to provide new tourism options and better communication networks across the globe. Over the long term, it might even include mineral exploitation and even mass transportation to ferry space travelers to and from the moon, Mars, and beyond. Thus far, the space industry has had a relatively narrow focus of facilitating activities specific to supporting earth. These capabilities primarily include various forms of satellites used for communication, broadcasting, and navigation, such as the United States' Global Positioning System, or GPS. Even the International Space Station largely supports human life on earth by acting as the sole laboratory where microgravity experimentation can occur, providing a whole host of advances for humans worldwide. As we progress further and further into the 21st century, there are new forces that are changing space and the purpose that it has. As an example, the Chinese Space Agency has made great strides in recent years and is on its way to catch up to the United States and Russia in terms of space capability. In the past couple of decades, the Chinese have launched hundreds of rockets from their Long March series of launchers, which has become the mainstay for the Chinese space program. This has allowed the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, also known as Chang'e, to make great strides in recent decades. Starting with Chang'e 1 and 2, for the first time in Chinese space history, probes were set to the moon and assumed lunar orbit. Then came Chang'e 3, which landed on the surface of the moon, and finally Chang'e 4, which became the first spacecraft ever to land on the far side of the moon, returning some of the most spectacular photos of the lunar surface ever seen. Chang'e 5, which is expected to launch this December, is planning to travel to the surface of the moon and return surface samples to earth for the first time since the Soviet Union's Luna Program in the China's emerging space power has all been made possible by the steady increase in spending on space-related activities. Although the exact amount of funding is not known, it is expected that China now ranks number 2 in space funding worldwide. This of course makes new space programs in China, such as their plan to launch their own space station in 2022, and eventually astronauts to the moon by 2035, all the more realistic. Likewise, NASA has also announced plans to expand their own space program by announcing Project Artemis this past May. This plan, which builds upon the now defunct Constellation program of the early 2000s, plans to return astronauts to the moon by sometime in 2024. NASA plans to do so by using what is known as the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway, or what some are calling the ISS 2.0. This international project will be a moon orbiting station to serve as the staging point for robotic and crewed missions to the lunar surface and beyond. The idea is to have the new super-heavy launch vehicle being developed by NASA, the Space Launch System, or SLS, to launch from earth and dock with a gateway that is orbiting the moon. At this point, a portion of the crew may stay on the station while others descend to the surface in a special lunar shuttle, explore the moon, and then return to the gateway before heading back to earth. This is not to mention the whole host of other nations in Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and other nations that are intending on bombarding space with more robotic probes than you can count. As space costs have fallen over the past few decades, and especially since the Apollo missions, it is cheaper than ever to reach beyond earth's orbit and explore new frontiers. For reference, the Apollo program cost the American taxpayer roughly $25 billion from 1963 to 1973, or $283 billion in today's dollars. Now, it is likely the cost of a ticket to the moon isn't more than $20 to $30 billion over the lifetime of the program. Apart from this, we must also mention the private sector and its advancement and inclusion in the 21st century space race. Between 1958 and 2009, almost all spending in space was performed exclusively by governments and mainly by NASA and the Pentagon. In the past decade since 2009, the private investment in space travel has risen dramatically to an average annual spend of $2 billion per year, or roughly 15% of the total industry. This amount is driven primarily from three companies, SpaceX, which is headed by Elon Musk and launched 21 successful launches in the last year alone, Blue Origin, headed by Jeff Bezos and focused on its Blue Lander technology, and finally Virgin Galactic, headed by Richard Branson, focusing on suborbital space flights for tourists and travel. One major benefit that the private sector provides is a dramatic increase in efficiency. NASA estimates that developing the Falcon rockets produced by SpaceX would have cost the agency roughly $4 billion. For SpaceX, however, it has only cost one-tenth of that. These aforementioned companies are primarily chasing two commercial business models. Number one, the launching and maintaining of swarms of communications satellites, such as SpaceX's Starlink program, and number two, space tourism, of course, if you can afford it, that is. This next year alone, both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are expected to fly passengers on suborbital excursions, offering both a thrill of weightlessness and an unparalleled view of the Earth from near heaven above. SpaceX has even taken a down payment from a Japanese fashion mogul to take a free return trajectory trip around the moon as early as 2023. With all of this advancement, however, there are some major problems with the current view of space exploration going forward that must be addressed. Currently, the rule of law in space, an area where no nation has sovereignty, is largely out of date. Some will point to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which outlines some basic principles such as that space is free and for exploration, and that no claims of sovereignty can be made. But these rules assume that space is dominated by nation-states, not by companies or let alone individual billionaires. Additionally, one area of particular concern to NASA is the growing problem of space debris. NASA already tracks more than 500,000 pieces of space junk in orbit around the Earth. With objects reaching velocities of over 27,000 kilometers per hour, even an object as small as a marble presents an incredibly dangerous threat. What's worse is that this has been exacerbated even more by the advent of anti-satellite missile technology. The first anti-satellite test of its kind was performed by China in 2007 and is estimated that it alone increased the amount of trackable space debris by 25%. This presents a real problem known to astronomers as Kessler syndrome, one in which the density of objects orbiting Earth is high enough that the collisions begin to cascade, creating a sort of domino effect and producing more and more space debris. The implication being that we could possibly make low Earth orbit almost completely unreachable simply from too much debris. Apart from this, the number of objects orbiting Earth is about to skyrocket. Since Sputnik was launched in 1957, 8,650 objects have been launched into space. As SpaceX begins to roll out their new constellation of satellites to support Starlink, a new broadband internet service composed of satellites in low Earth orbit, more than 12,000 small satellites will be launched alone. This, along with the growing problem of space debris, will make the governance of space an ever increasing item of importance going forward. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really do enjoy making these videos and plan on continuing to release one video every couple of weeks. I am curious to hear about what ideas you have on how the space industry will change over the next few decades. Comment below on your ideas, and if you enjoyed the video be sure to give it a like and subscribe to the channel.