Back in the Stone Age of the internet, round about the mid-90s, I used to belong to the Astronomy group on Compuserve. I first went online after installing a 14.4Kbps modem onto my 486 computer (which had a 66MHz processor and a 256M hard drive). It was a text-based online experience in those days. It took several minutes to download a 100K graphic while sucking through a tiny 14.4 straw.
Anyway, all these astro-nerds on Compuserve used to drone on wearisomely about NASA being the future of spaceflight. I rankled them all by stating that:
“One day an eccentric billionaire like Bill Gates (the world’s richest man du jour at the time) will finance a private space program and figure out how to turn a buck off space. Then there will be a GOLD RUSH into space as all the major corporations follow. Instant space colonies. And then everyone will say ‘NASA who?'”
I got flamed up and down and sideways by those nerds for daring to utter such blasphemy against Almighty NASA. But Elon Musk was just applying for grad school at Stanford around that time and that “one day” was still far into the future. The visionaries lacked the vision to imagine such possibilities.
Should Jesus tarry and our domestic enemies on the left not screw up everything, we can potentially look forward to a bright future of space-based mining and manufacturing. There is literally unlimited free energy in space from perpetual sunshine and literally unlimited raw materials in the asteroid belt, including 16 Psyche, which has about $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion dollars) worth of iron and nickel just floating there, waiting for humans to come help themselves. We currently have the available technology to create a fleet of unmanned mining drones that could process such raw materials. Manufacturing is just another small step. And then there will be no more need for mining and polluting the Earth.
This isn’t Star Trek! We don’t need to wait until the 23rd century! All we need is the will (and the $$$) to make those first steps out onto the High Frontier. And Elon Musk might just be the guy.