The End of the Space Age
5th July 2011
The current edition of The Economist (July 2nd, 2011) has a provocative cover story. With the retirement of the last space shuttle this month, and the de-orbiting of the International Space Station in 2020, The Economist believes ‘the game will be up’ for manned spaceflight: there will be no more of it. And with all the planets already visited by robot craft, even unmanned space exploration will soon be sputtering out.
The tag line for the article is: ‘Inner space is useful. Outer space is history’. The Economist sees much future activity in the economically-valuable torus bounded by low-Earth and geosynchronous orbits, a volume destined to become a ‘tamed wilderness’. But beyond that: nothing.