Is the Future Spaceships or Cars?

According to Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, the cost of getting you and your spacesuit into orbit could soon be about $120. That would mean a price improvement curve of $45 million to $100. Is space travel really the future?

We also feature a clip from an interview with Michael Schrage, research fellow with the Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business. He doesn’t believe for a second that people are going to give up cars for the foreseeable future: “Folks at MIT tend to self-select towards the revolutionary side, but ordinary human beings, typical human beings, human beings who have, shall we say, real lives, not MIT lives, are more prepared to have a mix of the disruptive innovation and the incremental innovation.”

Today marks the final installment of Big Think’s series, “The Future in Motion,” where we released new interviews with people who are changing the way we get from here to there, from entrepreneurs to policy makers. Over the past several weeks, we’ve featured interviews with Richard Schaden, Aeronautical engineer and founder of Beyond The Edge; Mitchell Joachim, founder of Terreform ONE; Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogata; Felix Kramer, founder of the non-profit, California Cars Initiative; famous aerospace engineer Burt Rutan; director of MIT Media Lab’s Smart Cities Group Bill Mitchell; PhD student at MIT Media Lab, Ryan Chin; Director of Advanced Mobility Research at Art Center College of Design, Geoff Wardle; Caltech chemistry professor Nate Lewis; President and Chief Scientist, AeroVisions Inc Doug Malewicki; and MIT professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Joseph Sussman.