The New Frontier: A Realistic Timeline from 2026 to 2060
This is Part 2 of a 6-part series called “The New Frontier.” Part 1 laid out the vision: industrial orbit, a permanent Moon base, and the road to Mars. This article gets granular. Dates, numbers, dependencies — and where the whole thing could fall apart. Every roadmap is wrong. The question is whether it’s wrong in useful ways. What follows is my best attempt at a realistic, multi-track timeline for space industrialization from now through 2060. I’ve organized it in four phases, and within each phase I cover all the major tracks in parallel — Starship, Artemis, orbital compute, Mars, commercial ventures, China — because that’s how reality works. These programs don’t exist in silos. A slip in Starship affects Artemis. A breakthrough in ISRU changes the Mars calculus. China’s pace changes everyone’s funding. ...