SpaceColonization
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Quora Answer : How long will it take for us humans to start a society on another planet?
At least 300 years. And only then if we're lucky.
We may get a "permanent" moon colony (something like the ISS, with regular, rotating crews) in the next 50 years. But only if there's a compelling reason. (Remember we've made more or less no moon colonization progress in the last 40 years.)
A manned Mars shot is probably still 100 years away. Not that it couldn't be done earlier if we REALLY, REALLY wanted to. But, the sad truth is that we don't. Not really. Not as much as we want to spend our scarce resources on other things. Not even ElonMusk has enough money or will for that.
Basically, I don't see us having manned flight to other planets in the solar system unless and until we have a fairly well established system of robot mining vessels regularly fetching resources from asteroids and comets.
It's just not viable to send things like water from Earth to Mars. Once it's possible to grab comets made of ice and harness them to our Earth-to-Mars or Earth-to-Jupiter transport, then we might consider it. Not until then.
Quora Answer : How can I start a space exploration company?
You start the company like any other.
Your main problem is that most things in space are expensive and unless you are already very rich or have an idea and team that are VERY compelling to investors, then you probably can't afford to do much in this area, EXCEPT process data which other people are generating.
Google are clever in that their current proposed project involves putting up some mediumly expensive telescopes to scan asteroids but largely their contribution is ground-based data-processing.
The cheapest way to get somewhere in space is a project like KickSat – Your personal spacecraft in space! (which does seem to have launched now, would be interesting to know how it's going and whether there are similar plans in the near future.) If you can think of commercial opportunity with that kind of satellite, then something along those lines seems reasonable.
Your best bet, though is to identify interesting opportunities in processing data to look for something that other people currently aren't and which might have commercial value.
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