What is the future of space travel?
Low-Earth orbit, this tiny slither of space about 400 kilometres (250 miles) up, is no longer the purview of governments and large aerospace companies. New space companies are taking advantage of what we call the democratisation of space. Why is access to space becoming easier? In part it’s because the cost to get to space is dropping significantly, and there are three main reasons for that. The first is reusability. Secondly there is also a rapid growth in production and deployment of very small spacecraft called CubeSats. The third reason is that we are developing much higher capability in much smaller packages – if time is money in business, then mass is money in the space business.
That is opening up the space environment, so the exploration of the past is being replaced by space commerce, at least at low-Earth orbit. There are private spaceports opening up all around the United States, and a few internationally. Spaceports embody space tourism, which is a world in which space becomes accessible to you and to me. When Virgin Galactic explore outer space and everything goes well, within about a year they will have flown three times as many people into space then have gone in the previous 60 years.
Private commercial enterprises taking over lowEarth orbit allows government-led enterprises, such as NASA and so on, to focus on creating the new phase of exploration. They take the next steps to push those
frontiers much further.