The future of space travel is starting right now | Garrett Reisman | Big Think

100 years from now, I think we'll be celebrating the centennial of 2020 and all the stuff that's going to happen in 2020. Not just this crazy pandemic and all the stuff that is happening, but this is, as far as space goes, 2020 is going to be a really good year.

I know 2020, I'll admit, 2020 so far has not been one of my more favorite years. In fact, it's pretty terrible. All right, it's been pretty awful. But I can also tell you that there's gonna be something really, really amazing that happens in 2020, which is that we're finally going to see their true launch—no pun intended—of this whole new era of space exploration.

This is led by a lot of private companies working in partnership with NASA that are going to take us back to space using American rockets launching from American soil. It's going to happen first by SpaceX. SpaceX has been working on the Crew Dragon vehicle for a long time now, and this is the year it's gonna fly. You know, we have a date actually scheduled. Let's say only two months from now is when we plan to do the first flight with people.

This can be Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, two former colleagues of mine, two friends of mine, are going to be the first test pilots to fly Dragon up to the space station. So we're finally going to get to the point in SpaceX where we're launching people on our rockets, which is what the company was founded for.

But it's not just SpaceX; Boeing is not that far behind on their spacecraft, the Starliner. And then we have two other private companies that are doing suborbital flights purely for space tourism. But both these companies have plans and ambitions to go beyond that. That is Blue Origin, which has a new Shepard vehicle that's going to go straight up.

Like I said before, it's gonna go straight up and straight back down, but you'll get high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. You'll experience about five minutes of floating in zero gravity, and it's going to be an incredible ride. If I hadn't already gotten myself a ticket, I would totally be buying one right now.

So, Elon and Jeff Bezos, they put a lot of money and resources into kind of jump-starting this whole endeavor to get us back on that trajectory towards having a colony on Mars. Or in the case of Jeff Bezos, he wants to have massive space stations where millions of people can live in space and do all the manufacturing.

He wants to basically turn Earth into a national park kind of thing where you can come and visit, but let's get all the factories off of this planet so we stop polluting it. They have these incredibly grand visions, so that’s gonna change everything. The access to space for humans is going to drastically expand this year, in 2020.

So I think in a hundred years, first of all, we're going to be celebrating 2020. And so, 2120, get ready for a big party! I'd say just like we had all these great events to celebrate the 50th anniversary of landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 and the Apollo program, we're going to be celebrating 2020 in the same way.

Because this is just the start. All those things I just described, as wonderful as they are, and this big of a step as they are, it's just the first step. Because all these companies and all these projects that we're talking about are just the beginning. The next step, and the things that they have on the drawing boards, the things not just on drawing boards but the things that are being tested in Boca Chica and in other places where the other companies have their test sites, are really gonna knock your socks off.

We're talking about incredible new machines, new rockets that can carry lots of people and go much further—back to the moon, on to Mars. But what's happening here in 2020 is the start of all that. Basically, all those dreams that we were promised in science fiction in the 1950s about taking your vacations amongst the rings of Saturn, that’s gonna start now.

We're heading that way, and I couldn't be more excited about that. Get smarter, faster, videos daily at 5:00 a.m. Eastern.