8/27/12: Space Case

Proposition: Jake will visit space by January 1, 2085.

Odds: Even

Stakes: $1,000

Bettors: Me, Jake

***

Easy, convenient, cheap space travel seems to always be around the corner. We fantasized a future built around it with the Jetsons in the 1960s and stretched our imaginations with Star Wars in the 1970s. Then we got personal computers in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s and smart tech in the 2000s and...well, even with all our progress, space travel seems as far away to most Americans as it was back when Astro and George were getting stuck on that doggy treadmill in the sky.*

Ironically, much of this is due to NASA, the people that got us out of the atmosphere in the first place. NASA's budget, which during the Space Race in the 1950s and 1960s was enormous relative to GDP, has plummeted; though we still send billions of tax dollars down to Houston and Cape Canaveral every year, it's but a tiny slice of the federal pie. And yes, though we've gotten fairly good** at sending robot vehicles into space, we're still limiting space travel to all but the hardiest, brightest, best-trained souls.***

What, then, needs to change? Two things, primarily: Increased funding by the private sector, and the decrease in cost of sending people into space by orders of magnitude. It probably costs, all told, millions of dollars to send a person into space--and we've been doing this for fifty years! Jake won't make it up there until it costs mere thousands to do the same thing. And who's going to send him? Again, it won't be NASA--it'll be some company trying to make a buck or two off intrepid souls who want to spend an afternoon circling the Earth.

If we've made barely any progress in the last half-century of space travel, what makes Jake so optimistic about the next fifty years? I'm not sure. One theory is that the space travel industry will really take off (pun intended) when we figure out how to mine asteroids for rare-Earth metals, something the Chinese have a monopoly on and which we desperately need for all that cool tech we've spent the last few decades inventing. Pure speculation, of course, but a plausible scenario. Another theory: self-assembling nanobots will give us space elevators that make space travel easy and affordable, but not even the most forward-thinking future junkies see this happening any time soon.

And so, for now, we wait. (Cue Elton John's "Rocket Man.")

*Why did anyone think it would make sense to live in pods miles above the Earth? I guess for the same reason we thought it would be cooler to just have an oven use its large gloved robot hands to sprinkle some water on a cube and turn it into a chicken dinner.

**That is, when the robot vehicles don't break and become useless on landing, as one did just a few years back.

***And millionaires like Dennis Tito, and gay millionaires like the dude from N'Sync.