The big reason not much happened in space in the past was cost. The Space Shuttle ended up costing around $60,000/kg to send stuff to space. SpaceX brought that down to $2,600/kg with the Falcon 9. And if Starship lives up to its potential, you're looking at $10/kg. You literally cannot overstate the impact of that change.
Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible.
In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.
> Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals.
We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus.
It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
It's already cheaper to fly between UK cities via Barcelona than to take the train; in ten years time it'll be cheaper to go from London to Edinburgh via the L2 Lagrange point.
That's more a factor of the price of train tickets.
It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.
Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible.
In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.