The future of space exploration

The International Space Station is 20 years old. A robot has landed on Mars. Billionaire adventurers have set their sights on the stars. What next for humankind’s great space adventure?

What's happened?

The past week has seen two highly significant and contrasting moments in the history of the human exploration of space. First, the International Space Station (ISS), which circles the Earth in low orbit, marked its 20th anniversary to relatively little media fanfare. As its operations are defunded and wound down over the coming decade, its replacements are set to be commercially driven enterprises from the likes of Axiom Space and Bigelow Aerospace. The week's other major milestone, which generated rather more excitement, was the successful mission by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to land a new robot on Mars (the first since 2012) following a dramatic seven-minute, high-velocity descent. The Insight landing is significant for two main reasons. First, it included two briefcase-sized satellites called MarCO A and B, which cost $20m. Second, its mission is to probe the deep interior of the planet, making Mars the first planet other than Earth to be examined in this way.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.