It's common to do retrospective or forward-looking articles around the new year, so I've decided to follow tradition and make a prediction. The prediction business is a risky thing, but that's what makes it interesting: if it were like mathematics, we'd simply get computers to do it for us.

The domain of my prediction is prompted by the flurry of exploration probes that are either landing or crashing on Mars at the moment. Some commentators are taking the opportunity to promote the revival of a manned space programme beyond low Earth orbit, such as the possibility of a manned expedition to Mars, or a permanent moon base. I'll go out on a limb here, albeit a fairly sturdy one, and predict that there will be no serious moves to achieve either of these things in the next ten years.

Ten years isn't too long a time-frame with regards to space exploration: it took most of that for the Apollo program to achieve its goal of a man on the moon. Bear in mind that the Apollo program had tremendous social backing: it had the public will behind it. That unity of public will was largely driven by hostile competition with the USSR, and the perception that dominance of space was the Next Big Thing. The "Next Big Thing" syndrome is also what drove Internet-related stocks to boom and bust around the turn of the millennium. Racing against a competitor towards the Next Big Thing is a great motivator.

In the absence of some great technological breakthrough, like warp engines, hyper-drives, jump gates, or other transport technologies from the realms of science fiction, we are going to need the benefits of Next Big Thing syndrome in order to so much as aim at a goal like a moon base or a manned expedition to Mars. Ten years is a fairly short time for a technological breakthrough, so I'll predict that no such breakthrough will happen. That leaves us with Next Big Thing syndrome, and I think space exploration has had its day as Next Big Thing, for now at least. We've been to the moon, and we don't yet have a compelling reason to go back.

There's an outside chance that a country like China will get serious about manned space exploration (motivated by the fact that they haven't been to the moon yet), and this could spark another space race, but China has a fair bit of catching up to do before it will be viewed as a competitive threat. Maybe I should extend my prediction and say that manned exploration of space will not meet any significant milestones (on the scale of Apollo-11) in the next twenty years, but I'm not that brave. On the other hand, it's been over thirty years since the last of the moon missions, so maybe I'm just hopelessly conservative.