What Space Logistics in 2050?: Big Pictures, Trends and Scenarios in the Emerging Space Economy

What role does Space play in the evolution of the economy? And of humanity? How useful is it to anticipate possible future developments? These are questions that until a few decades ago were of interest to a few experts or enthusiasts, but which today must be considered by companies, international organisations, and even voters. Technological accelerations in fact promise epochal developments: Space is a candidate to become a context of possible productive ecosystems, this will require the ability to manage and administer new levels of complexity to bring out desirable dynamics for human and planetary development, rather than new areas of conflict.With this book we want to offer hints for possible answers and to make people think about strategic issues that will potentially affect everyone. For this we try to imagine and narrate a variety of possible futures, based on different sources (including opinions of authoritative experts from ESA, UN, and multinational companies) and original applications of strategic foresight methods (Horizon Scanning, Exploratory Scenarios, Causal Layered Analysis, Systems Archetypes). The ambition is to help anticipate and prepare desirable futures in the medium and long term and to disseminate an attitude of farsightedness.“Pietro Guerrieri and Rocco Scolozzi have worked diligently to link systems thinking with space futures. However, while most books stay at the litany level extolling the virtues of space travel or arguing against space travel due to the problems on Earth, Guerrieri and Scolozzi take us further. Along with scenarios (space colonization, the missed spaceboat, Elysium - space for the few, and space wars), they use CLA to go deeper, to uncover the core assumptions of our space futures. This is likely the first use of CLA to space futures. The book truly becomes alive at his juncture. The authors move us from numerous litanies (nationalism, an exciting enterprise, a profitable context, and an environment to defend) to the systems that support these litanies, the worldviews that are used to make sense of them (no limits, the destiny of humanity) to the core metaphors. These include: the El Dorado and the Explorer, the Alchemical Philosopher's stone, the Ark, and the Utopia. All in all, a welcome book critical for understanding space futures.”- Sohail Inayatullah - UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. IIUM. Professor, Tamkang University. Editor, the Journal of Futures Studies, and researcher. Famous for introducing and pioneering the futures technique of causal layered analysis (CLA). Read more