The private sector’s answer is to race to put rich people in space.  Just two weeks ago, Richard Branson unveiled Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo that will take anyone willing to pay $200,000 into suborbital space.

Will Branson’s version of space tourism become the norm of space travel and what would be implications to governmental space travel?  Space.com looks forward to 2061.

Tourism is the leading edge of the commercial push into space. But for humanity to really establish a presence in Earth orbit and beyond, other space-based industries must be developed as well, experts say.

“People need to figure out business models by which you can monetize other aspects of human spaceflight beyond tourism,” Stern told SPACE.com. “Bob Bigelow has one, with his space station. We need 50 Bob Bigelows.”

Those other commercial opportunities may include mining asteroids for precious metals, or extracting the moon’s ample water stores to produce rocket fuel, which would be sold to spaceships at orbiting filling stations.

Indeed, some businesses are already planning out such ventures. The private firm Shackleton Energy Company, for example, plans to send robotic scouts to the moon in the next four years and hopes to be selling propellant in low-Earth orbit by the end of the decade.

If some of these ideas pan out, more and more entrepreneurs and companies might see business opportunities in space. The effects could snowball, and the proverbial heavens could soon open up.

“Fifty years in the future, I would hope that millions of people have had the opportunity to travel to space, and that thousands of people live there,” Whitesides told SPACE.com. “I think outposts on the moon and Mars are entirely possible, with tourism to the lunar surface an expensive but possible activity.”

The coming explosion in commercial spaceflight capabilities should free up NASA to explore farther afield than it ever has before.

NASA is retiring its space shuttle program later this year after three decades of service. The agency is counting on companies such as SpaceX to take up the burden of ferrying astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit over the long haul.

“If others are able to take that on, then we can concentrate on exploration and discovery, which are really what we’re here for,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

NASA is already eyeing destinations beyond low-Earth orbit and the moon. President Barack Obama’s vision for the nation’s human spaceflight future calls for NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and then on to Mars by the 2030s.

NASA has many reasons to send astronauts to Mars — chief among them to search for evidence of life on the Red Planet, be it past or present. And astronauts could well be looking for microbes in the Martian dirt before 2061 rolls around.

“I think in this timeframe, we could easily have sent people to Mars,” Cooke told SPACE.com. “We may have gone there repeatedly.”

Many of their projections will probably happen.  I don’t doubt that we will go back to the moon and most likely set foot on Mars.  I also agree that near-Earth operations will be domain on private entities.  My fear, however, is that Americans no longer have the spirit of adventure in them to reach for Mars.  We’ve quickly become a nation that is allergic to risk and too cynical to believe in making possible the impossible.

At some point, we must regain our American-ness before the scientific and explorative acheivements of the 21st Century launch past us in the powerful rockets of another nation.

The space explosion was detected on March 28 when an instrument on NASA’s Swift satellite detected an X-ray eruption, the first in a series of powerful blasts. The Swift observatory determined a rough position for the explosion, which scientists are now calling the gamma-ray burst (GRB) 110328A.

After Swift’s discovery, an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on Monday (April 4) pinpointed the exact source of the blast — the center of a small galaxy in the Draco constellation. That same day, astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a four-hour exposure of the puzzling source.

Although research is ongoing, astronomers say that the unusual explosion likely arose when a star wandered too close to its galaxy’s central black hole. Intense tidal forces probably tore the star apart, and the infalling gas continues to stream toward the black hole.

According to this model, the spinning black hole formed an outflowing jet, which is blasting powerful X-rays and gamma rays in our direction, researchers said.

“The fact that the explosion occurred in the center of a galaxy tells us it is most likely associated with a massive black hole,” said Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist for Swift at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. “This solves a key question about the mysterious event.”

[hattip: NASA]

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

While this awesome, it doesn’t compare with the total lunar eclipse this Monday night. The entire Western Hemisphere will be treated to 72 minutes of the Wrath of God for the United States repealing DADT.

The new Mars rover, Curiosity, is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in 2012 and Space.com has the lowdown on her capabilities.  Sounds pretty cool.  Doctor Emmett Brown, however, was less than impressed by its choice of power supply….plutonium.  His reaction can be seen here.

[hattip: NASA]