Space travel in the future

What are the options for future space travel? The human race has long looked up to the stars in search of inspiration, enlightenment or excitement, and in the 20th century, we made huge strides out into the great beyond called space. The first satellites were launched in the 1950s, then came the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and then the launch of the International Space Station in 1998. Today our sights are set further still and our ambitions are even higher. Given the growing concerns over global warming and climate change, it’s perhaps easy to see why NASA, Space X, Boeing and various others are aiming to escape our atmosphere to jet off to someplace else.

Missions to Mars and commercial space flights finally seem to be a near-future reality, but exactly how is the technology progressing and how must it evolve to achieve the starry dreams of mankind? The biggest and probably most obvious hurdle we need to overcome is the time it takes to actually get anywhere in space. You can reach the Moon within a week, but travelling to Mars takes months, so shortening the cosmic commute is something we desperately need to accomplish. With this in mind that the chemical rockets are outdated and ineffective, requiring up to 10 to 15 times their own weight in fuel just to enter the Earth’s orbit, in general, there’s a dire need for an updated and reliable propulsion system achieving more speed on less fuel or else creating fuel on the go. This would also allow us to ditch launch windows which currently dictate when we should and shouldn’t jet off to space.