The next one hundred years

Friends,

Just for the heck of it, here is my take on how space colonization
might unfold over the next 100 years. I'd like to hear what people
think.

2000-2010: The first step, for better or worse, will be the
International Space Station. Slowly but surely, it will be pieced
together and we will learn useful stuff from the experience.

c. 2020: A manned mission to Mars involves much celebration and some
useful planetary science. The real value of the mission is that it
serves as a focus for all kinds of R&D projects and provides a way to
test lots of ideas about long term space habitation.

c. 2030: We finally go back to the moon. A long term base, like the
ones in Antarctica, is established. Its main goals are to study the
moon, to study what living on the moon does to people, and as a focus
for various R&D projects...like what are the problems in actually
building a 50-km. solar-powered mass driver to boost things off the
moon?

c. 2040: Someone figures out that we can lots of new cool things on
the moon if we could only get LOTS of volatiles. So, they nudge a
100-meter NEO asteroid into lunar orbit and start cutting it up into
chunks. Having actually done it once, however, folks have learned
what they need to know to do it over and over and over...the art of
mining asteroids has been born.

c. 2050: More and more cool things can be done in microgravity and
orbital factories are set up both near the Earth and in orbit around
the moon. These factories gradually grow until thousands of people
are employed. It is at this point that people start seriously
thinking about permanent orbital colonies because there are now a
large enough number of people working at the orbital factories that
moving them back to Earth every six months or so is getting really
expensive.

In short, space colonies won't happen as an idealistic end goal for
which an industry is created...we'll stumble into it by developing
technologies that we want or need and which can be done a lot better
in microgravity than on Earth. And then we'll put more and more
people into space in increments of a hundred here and hundred there
until it makes sense to build a city for them.

In addition, by 2050, we have mastered the art of building high
strength carbon fibers (spun diamond fiber, buckytubes, etc.) in very
large quantities at relatively low cost. (Does anyone want to talk
about this...is 50 years enough to solve the technical problems that
keep us from doing this now?) With these building materials, the
various design problems involved in building rotating space habitats
can all be resolved. Converting a small asteroid into a) a large
shield of non-rotating slag and b) a microworld build mostly out of
carbon fibers, etc. is now possible and economically feasible.

c. 2070: The first true microworld (i.e., a settlement designed for
long term living in space) is built. There are also some scientific
settlements on Mars and in the asteroid belt...just like the ones on
the moon a generation earlier.

c. 2090: Twenty years later, there are only a few more microworlds.
But with each new one, we gain a bigger and bigger toehold. We have
not yet reached what is probably the true critical point--when the
microworlds have large enough economies that they can demand and
support their own new developments--but that day is coming.

Any thoughts on this?

Mark