What’s more depressing is that their estimates may well be optimistic.

NASA mission to put humans on an asteroid ‘revealed’ – will you still be alive?

Researchers analyzed NASA’s budget since the 1960s to gauge how likely a mission to the asteroid belt is within the next century.

…

The researchers concluded that a crewed mission to the asteroid could take place as early as 2073, while astronauts may land on Jupiter by 2103 and on Saturn by 2132.

FFS.

Remember when NASA had some fricken’ *vision?* At least now there are vastly faster options than NASA.

I don’t, because it was before I was born. But just a few years before I came on the scene, NASA really did plan for an adventurous future, on an optimistic timescale. For instance, this from 1966:

“Research station on Titan” by 2000 or so.

*Somewhere* around here (I thought on this blog) I’ve got a chart I believe by Krafft Ehricke that lays out a more detailed vision of the future, along the lines of the crude graph above. Familiar to anyone?