Prediction - 🚀 A Commercial "Travel Via Space" Service Will Be Live Within 10 Years

Prediction Date - 29 Nov 2024 / End Date - 29 Nov 2034

To be more specific in prediction, there will be a point-to-point travel option for humans commercially available.

This is one of those things that I myself find hard to believe, but its viable.

You do not need to look beyond a single trend to see it. It is the mind blowing increase in the cadence of number of rocket launches. Watch this animation—watch the full 2 minutes and 20 seconds—and see how we went from a few annual launches to multiple launches every month.

This was considered impossible a decade ago. A pipe dream!

Today, we are getting to the rate of multiple launches per week. And this is just SpaceX, we have other private companies starting to have successful launches. In the running are - Blue Origin, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity’s Terran R, Firefly’s MLV (as mentioned here) and more.

The cadence will soon increase to multiple launches per day. We will get to this astounding normalcy in the next 10 years. Even if I am wrong about the 10 year time frame, it is inevitable.

Further, the cost to launch has crashed from $100,000+ per kg to under $1,500 per kg (data here) to Low Earth Orbit. This trend is not going to slow down.

Both these facts together mean that there will be frequent, low cost launches to space every hour. So imagine a world where there are multiple companies collectively launching (and landing!) rockets every hour. If you squint, it starts to look very similar to the current airline industry. All you have to do is swap planes with rockets.

There are enough people in this world for whom every minute of day matters (like the top 1% of the world). Anything that shaves off a few hours of international travel time is a boon. It is a no brainer decision for them to pay to use such a service.

Musk already has said that the Starship is capable of point-to-point transport on Earth in an hour. This means that one can theoretically have dinner in Mumbai at 6 pm IST, fly to San Francisco (7 pm IST to 8 am Pacific), have a breakfast meeting there, fly back and then be back home in bed sleeping by midnight IST.

RIP to the circadian rhythm of all the management consultants. 😬

Even if the travel time gains are not as fantastic as what is claimed, it will still be so much better than today that people will pay much more than a first class ticket or charter flight rates to hitch a quick ride. And there will come a time when it will match the cost of a business class airfare today. And then eventually economy. 1 hour of perhaps slightly more uncomfortable space-cattle travel will still be much more attractive than the current 24 hours of airplanes.

Spaceports will be real within our lifetime. See you on a space ride soon-ish!