Normally this newsletter about the long-term future is all-digital — it’s in the name. But sometimes the “future” depends on some very physical questions that also deserve attention.

One of these is how we’ll someday get around in space.

We aren’t the only tech people fascinated by this question; when moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk make money on digital tech, they pour it enthusiastically into space projects. Their main products right now are rockets to get off the Earth’s surface, but the real long game — the kind of thing that preoccupies tech billionaires and NASA planners — is what happens next.

Musk wants humanity to think about its potential future as “a multiplanet species & true spacefaring civilization,” NASA’s long-term human space travel plans now live firmly in the “research” zone, but its ideas for propelling craft deeper into space aren’t just experiments anymore.

To read more, click here.