How long will it be until humans can go into space?

Question

When will be be able to go into space? Will the tether come into hand, will we be able to go into space as often as we use public jet transportation?

Answer 1

What do you mean? Human have been in space for almost 50 years. We just went into space today.

When will it become like airplanes? Not for a while, but possibly in your lifetime (depends how old you are). We will have a permanent moon colony within 20 years. We'll be on Mars within 50. The space elevator is a very real possibility, but the engineering challenges are incredible and the costs astronomical (no pun intended). You won't see one for another 100 years.

But remember it was barely 500 years ago that the first rickety boats made the journey from Europe to America. Do you think those few sailors could ever have imagined New York or Los Angeles or the United States? 500 years from now, Mankind will have conquered the solar system and will be looking towards the stars.

Answer 2

Chemical rockets are very expensive, dangerous, inefficient and environmentally unfriendly. Space travel will only become as cheap as jet travel when we've got something like Arthur C. Clarke's space elevator; a way to lift payloads from the Earth's surface to geostationary orbit 36 000 km. high, at the end of a long cable, using electric power. Today it costs about $20000 to get a kg of payload up there. In principle, a space elevator could do it with a few cents worth of electricity. When? My guess is before the end of this century. If you read Ray Kurzweil's book, it should convince you that technological advances like you're talking about will happen very, very quickly.

Answer 3

There are many companies working on this problem right now. In 2004 the first privately funded spaceship made it into space and back, then did it again a few days later.
Unfortunately, this same company, developing a spaceship for Virgin Galactic, had an accident last week that claimed 3 lives. Unfortunately, accidents are bound to happen, but no one is giving up.
The company making the spaceship, called SpaceShipTwo is Scaled Composites. They are making five of these ships for Virgin Galactic. They have over 100 people who have already put down $200,000 for their ride into space. That may sound pricey, and it is, but Virgin Galactic's main goal is to have that price down to $5000 in 10 years.
Jim Benson of the Benson Space Company is also working on a ship and is hoping to beat Virgin Galactic to space.
Other companies include Blue Origin, Rocketplane, EADS Astrium, PlanetSpace and many more.
There is even a company, Bigelow Aerospace, who has put up their second test of what they hope to become a space hotel to be available for use in 2015.
The rich of us should be paying for fairly regular rides to space by 2010. The rest, probably 10-15 years later. (but there's always lotteries ;) )

Answer 4

Why? To visit the Space Station? Go to the Moon?

Nothing survives in space. Why spend a lot of money going no where.

Answer 5

Space shuttle made it a routine to go to space, in additional to Russian and Chinese rockets.
In order to send one pound of material to space, you need
150 lbs of rocket fuel. So it is a very limit payload that you can send to space.

Answer 6

What's this tether crap? No, space will continue to be a very restrictive place. The costs are still too high to expect widespread use.

Answer 7

its almost possible you will se it in your lifetime maybe when your like 80 years old, cause there are already "vacations" to space. but we cant go to the moon yet, but we will be able to in the near future

Answer 8

You can book a trip aboard the russian-made Sputnik, space-bound.

If you have several million to part with, and don't mind the risk of incinerating during atmosphere re-entry.