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Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

Eventually there are going to be cities in space.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

I'm sure there will continue to be exciting new products and major changes, but it looks as if the existing technology has a great deal of room to grow and prosper.

My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.

A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

The way that the robotics market is going to grow, at least in the home, is that we'll have a number of different special purpose robots.