The first human space mission to the asteroid belt could take place in 50 years from now as long as humans reach Mars by 2038, rocket engineers say.
Their predictions are based on an economic analysis of the rate at which space budgets have increased over time and how humans have increased their scope of operations since the dawn of the space age.
Jonathan Jiang's goal at the Jet Propulsion lab in Pasadena, and his colleagues, is to work out a time frame in which crewed missions to the asteroid belt, to Jupiter and even to Saturn are possible.
They began by studying how NASA's budget has increased since its creation in 1958. There are several peaks in this curve, corresponding to a significant increase in spending.
This corresponds to 1966 when the Apollo program where NASA's budget accounted for about 1% of the US Gross National Product, to 1991 when the agency decided to partner with the private sector to develop a space shuttle replacement, and to 2018 when it started the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon and then send them to Mars.
Technological development
However, the overall trend is steady linear growth, Jiang and his team said. They also seek to measure improvements in technology, as space missions depend on the design and operation of complex hardware and life support systems.
They did this simply by counting the number of scientific papers published on space exploration in the US per year.
"This can be used as a proxy to measure the overall technological level of cutting-edge developments in this complex realm," the researchers said.
The final factor the team used was the effective radius of human activity beyond Earth. It increased rapidly at the start of the space age from low Earth orbit to the first successful Moon landing at a distance of 0.0026 Astronomical Units.
Project Artemis will send humans to Mars around 2037 when the radius of human activity will increase to 0.3763 AU. Assuming the mission is a success, this provides another data point the team can use to project into the future.
Taking all these trends into account, allowed the team to come up with a model that predicts when a human mission to distant parts of the Solar System will take place. The model allocates 2073 for manned asteroid belt missions, 2103 for humans to visit Jupiter and its satellites and 2132 for missions to Saturn.
Saturn Visit
"The results so far suggest that the world of our Solar System, throughout human history only the specs of light in the night sky, will soon be within our reach," the team said.
Of course, this kind of prediction is full of uncertainty. Some factors such as sudden climate change can make space missions more urgent, while other factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic can dramatically slow progress. In the end, economic conditions and national priorities will determine the pace of development.
But the main message from Jiang and colleagues was that this mission could be accomplished in the not too distant future. They concluded: "Our model suggests human landings on worlds beyond the Moon and Mars may be witnessed by many people alive today."