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.

[Photo courtesy of National Geographic]

Fifty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin boarded Vostok 1 and became the first man to break the chains of gravity and explore the unknown of space.

During the height of the Cold War, this achievement was not celebrated as the triumph of humanity that it should have been.  Unfortunately, fear of Soviet technological supremacy and the possible military implications of successful manned space flight clouded our view of Gagarin’s mission.

With the passage of time, we now see Vostok I for what it was.  A milestone in the history of the human race where courage, technology, and our instinctive need to explore came together to allow us to adventure to where only we dared to dream just a few years before.

Across the world, Yuri Gagarin’s flight is being celebrated as Yuri’s Night.  Take a look at the events list to see what’s happening in your area.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

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.

The rocket is named HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE, and its first test flight will carry a crash-test dummy, rather than a human, so that the safety aspects of the design can be analyzed. It’ll launch from a floating platform that the team has also built, which will be towed into the middle of the Baltic Sea by a submarine called Nautilus that the pair built as their last project.

The creators are members of the SomethingAwful web community, and have been posting pictures and answering questions there. In response to one question asking what the chances of the person inside dying are, they replied: “Unlike Columbia we’re not moving at orbital speeds so ‘dying a gruesome death burning up on re-entry’ with our kit has a very low outcome probability.”

50 years of Exploration map from National Geographic.

It really is amazing how relatively few missions failed considering the use of what we now see as antiquated and, at the time, untested technologies being used to perform such daring missions.  Kudos to every scientist, engineer, astronaut, cosmonaut, astronomer, factory worker, mathematician, physicist, and bureaucrat that made these missions possible and more successful than we could imagine.

[hattip: Laughing Squid]