(written for “Flipside” the IET’s magazine for young people interested in engineering - a slightly longer version than that published)

When something is easy we say “its not rocket science” a phrase from the 1940s when large rockets were one of the most difficult, secret and expensive technologies available. Today, space rockets are rarely in the news, developing nations are making them and even space tourism is with us. So what of the future?

Star Wars, Star Trek and Dr Who will remain science fiction unless we discover significantly new laws of physics. We cannot even design a spacecraft capable of travelling even to the nearest star (4 light-years away) in less than hundreds (maybe thousands) of years and even a round trip to Mars, our next-door planet, will take at least two years. To leave Earth’s orbit the space craft must reach escape velocity of around 40,000 km per hour and that still needs a large and very expensive rocket for even a modest sized craft. Rocket science has become more reliable and commercial but the only really new technology is the ion-engine which can currently only push a craft with a few grams of force.

Space missions today are either military, commercial or for science, with satellites providing services for communications, TV, navigation, weather, astronomy and (of vital importance to the future of the environment), Earth sensing. Perhaps the space ships being planned for tourism may also be used to launch thousands of low cost micro-satellites to provide Internet from the sky that will help people in developing countries join the on-line community cheaply.

If you get a job in the space industry any time soon, then one of these important and profitable areas are likely to provide a fascinating and worthwhile engineering career. Robotic science missions to the planets and to understand more of the Cosmos are relatively few and research funding for these missions is always a problem but space research is another career for those more academically minded. It is unlikely that more than a modest handful of people will travel into space in the next 20 years either as a working astronaut or as space tourists.

If the Earth suffers a global catastrophe we already have the science and engineering capability to build a new home in space and we can (probably) build the technology to deflect a small rogue asteroid. The most far fetched, but potentially feasible idea is to do away with rockets and get into space via a cable made of a carbon nano-tubes (or similar new material), anchored to a large mass in orbit. The space craft, or climber, would be powered from the cable, and would travel up and down to geostationary orbit (36,000 km) by electric motors. Nuclear rocket engines for deep space travel may also be feasible, but we will need to be able to build safe compact fusion reactors first (and it is proving very difficult to build any sort of fusion reactor, let alone a small safe one!).

During your life time there is a reasonable prospect of manned science missions to Mars and certainly again to the Moon but there is little prospect of any economic activity to follow these explorers (apart perhaps from lunar mining tritium for fusion power). Perhaps a better prospect will be the creation of human environments in space, building on the expertise being gathered with the International Space Station now nearing completion. We will be able to build self-sustaining solar powered space environments (that will help us learn more about sustainability on Earth). Artificial gravity can be generated by rotating the space-station that will probably resemble a huge ring-doughnut. Another prospect is to mine asteroids for scarce minerals or to provide the material out of which to build more space-stations. Vegetarian food will be grown in a space-farm and everything will be recycled. Humanity’s future might well be in space but not in other Galaxies but much closer to home. Engineers in the future space industry will play an important part in saving humanity.