The Obama Administration has killed NASA's manned space program who with DARPA is now trying to enlist private industry to keep men in space. I am helping with that effort of course. We have to hitch rides on old Soviet spacecraft.
The future, then, looks bounded by that new outer limit of planet Earth, the geostationary orbit. Within it, the buzz of activity will continue to grow and fill the vacuum. This part of space will be tamed by humanity, as the species has tamed so many wildernesses in the past. Outside it, though, the vacuum will remain empty. There may be occasional forays, just as men sometimes leave their huddled research bases in Antarctica to scuttle briefly across the ice cap before returning, for warmth, food and company, to base. But humanity’s dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.
http://www.economist.com/node/18897425