This from the BBC : http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150128-space-2020-what-happens-next " - What will our space ambitions actually look like a decade from now? Three experts tell Richard Hollingham. Space has not been this exciting since the 1960s. Nasa recently launched Orion, its first new spacecraft to carry astronauts since the Space Shuttle, and is developing a massive new rocket to rival the Saturn V. Europe has landed a space probe on a comet 510 million kilometres (317 million miles) away and China is developing its next space station. Meanwhile private companies are changing the economics of space by forging ahead with plans for human spaceflight, space tourism and even missions to Mars. The next few years will also see the final construction of the James Webb Space Telescope – a space observatory the size of a tennis court. So in the decade from 2020, can we look forward to a glorious new space age of Moon bases, Mars colonies and more remarkable cosmic discoveries? To try to find out, we canvassed the opinions of an expert panel for their predictions beyond 2020. Our experts are: SP: Scott Pace, Director of the Space Policy Institute in Washington DC DB: David Baker, ex-Nasa engineer, author and editor of Spaceflight magazine MG: Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at the UK’s Open University - " - ^^ above quoted ^^ from : http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150128-space-2020-what-happens-next Interesting Q&A on the next Decade or so of Space Exploration...at least I found it to be so...
De-orbiting or space debris collection/tracking is going to continue to be a problem. A plan really needs to be in place to take more of it down than we create each time we launch something new into space. The latest film featuring this danger "gravity" left a lot to be desired in terms of realism. Geostationary satellites are much further away than satellites like Hubble (347 miles as opposed to 22300 miles). Blasting a geostationary satellite to bits would not send debris anywhere near the orbit of Hubble.
