50 Years Of Spaceflight

...coming up April 12th is the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space. And there are some kick-ass celebrations planned apparently.

But whither goeth spaceflight in the next 50 years?

That's a murkier question. NASA seems to be flailing without the shuttle and it's attempt to go back to the big, heavy lift, Apollo-style rockets to spur a return to the Moon and then possibly Mars after that ran aground on the rocks of the hard fiscal realities we're trying to deal with. China is tip-toeing into the human spaceflight game and Russia has a good thing going selling seats to the International Space Station but is no where near what it once was in terms of space power.

So where to from here? Should we even bother? I would say yes. Population here on Earth continues to go up, up and up, and technological progress goes with it yet we can never be sure of our survival as a species until we establish permanent colonies on other planets in our neighborhood. That lofty goal might be centuries off, but the fact is that death from above can occur at anytime and Bruce Willis won't be there to save us. If an asteroid comes, we're done. Game over. And then thousands of years of history, culture, art, progress, technology- all of it will be gone and for what? It's not like the Universe at large will care. So for me, it's a long term self-preservation argument more than anything else.

There are issues to overcome though: the amount of radiation in space and on, say, Mars would require us to live underground pretty much most of the time unless terraforming can be raised from science fiction to science- which I don't know is possible or not anytime soon. Radiation would also impact human fertility. There's no point in establishing a Mars colony if no one can have babies.

Then there's Earth's gravity well. The sheer cost of space travel, which a lot of people see as a needless waste of time can be chalked up to the problems of getting people away from gravity. Things like a Space Elevator (again, science fiction-y, but people are really working on making this happen- albeit slowly) or building a ship in orbit would solve that problem. The moves that both the Bush Adminstration and now the Obama Administration have made towards opening up space to private enterprise might spur competition enough to find another solution to the problem entirely. But if you can make gravity less expensive, then space travel, such as it is, becomes a whole lot cheaper.

So what would I like to see in 50 more years? I'd like to see us go to Mars, establish a more permanent presence in space- either on the Moon or at another station and I'd really like technological progress towards mitigating radiation and Earth's gravity well to make space travel and potential colonization more palatable and more of a reality.