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I think we are stuck in a rut. Airliners have gotten more reliable, more fuel efficient, have less engines to service, are in some cases made of composite materials, but they don’t go any faster.

We haven’t been back to the moon for 50 years. There have been hundreds of manned orbital flights, but none above 500 miles since the moon landings.

Something needs to break the log jam. Will it be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?

“Something needs to break the log jam. Will it be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?”

Yes, the private sector.

I think that as the technology brings costs down, it will (this decade) pass the point where only governments can do spaceflight, and let rich people, corporations, or other large organizations (like a church or NGO), start taking off on their own for flights. After we have two or three permanent settlements elsewhere, there will be enough know how for all kinds of groups to strike out on their own to settle.

Cheaper lift is happening. New propulsion systems are a tough to forecast wildcard. Long term life support habitats is a challenge for the 2020s. Significant self-sufficiency will be achieved some time after that. Plentiful energy sources would speed things up - but nuclear could do a lot, and solar is getting better and could be significant (inside the asteroid belt where you can still get good sunlight).

The 2020’s will also be the start of a great explosion of robotic capability, which will really push power down to smaller groups with less money. With enough robotic capability, even individuals could head out on their own.

In general, once technologies are developed, the cycle time for copies to become much cheaper and widespread keeps getting faster - when supersmart robots are 3-D printing stuff, it will be quicker still.

So it is likely that the speed of space colonization will continue to accelerate rapidly, once the initial capability is developed. my guess is that we will have initial operating capability in the 2020’s, and be off to the races in the 2030s, with many groups and Nations establishing long-term facilities off-Earth.

I think we are stuck in a rut. Airliners have gotten more reliable, more fuel efficient, have less engines to service, are in some cases made of composite materials, but they don't go any faster.

Even if you got to your destination INSTANTLY; airport 'procedures' and 'safety' and 'security' and 'frisking' would make your 'trip' time quite long.

There have been hundreds of manned orbital flights, but none above 500 miles since the moon landings.

There are at least two reasons.

One is that it is very dangerous outside the Earth's Magnetic field. You are exposed to a vast amount of radiation completely up and down the EM spectrum. And that is constant. Then there is the chance you get blasted by a CME. One can shield the spacecraft, but more weight means more fuel to move the craft about. It would take a lot more than we have on spacecraft now to shield a crew safely. Even the Space Station is at risk from CME's and the crew must take shelter in a shielded room.

The second problem is the lack of gravity. Many say creatures(like man) can adapt to changes, but that it takes a long, long time (like thousands of years).

Not true.

Put humans in a weightless environment for a couple of months and their leg muscles will atrophy, and their bones turn to jello. Eventually, you would turn into a round ball with short flippers protruding from the ball.

Sure, we can 'rotate' the spacecraft to try and provide gravity , but that only works if the craft is designed in a particular shape that makes the spin useful and gives the crew access to the outer arc of that shape.

Artificial gravity (other than spin) could be used, but we're about as close to having a useful efficient anti-grav device that could be mounted in a space ship as we are to having a Warp Drive.