Miami, Dec 16: In the second century of flight, private companies will ferry tourists into space, personal flying machines will roam digital skyways and executive jets will make supersonic speed around the globe, aviation experts and scientists say.
The next generation of airborne adventurers will carry colonists to the moon and to Mars, double-decker jetliners on Earth will load 1,000 passengers and small aircraft will depart and arrive on neighbourhood runways with little or no help from their pilot-passengers.


An explosion of aviation and space technology may also bring weaponry and war to Earth orbit as the military powers scramble for control of the heavens in a way Orville and Wilbur Wright likely never imagined when they launched human flight at Kitty Hawk , North Carolina , 100 years ago.

So much of aviation's promise is unfulfilled — routine space travel, globe-girdling flight at supersonic speed, a flying machine in every garage.


As America celebrates the centennial of the Wrights' historic flight on December 17, 1903 , aeronautic engineers are looking to the future and a move away from the cattle-herding of passengers through crowded airports to cramped aircraft.


"Aeronautics is not mature. We barely take advantage of it in our daily lives," said Mark Moore, one of Nasa's top thinkers on future flight.

Space tourism is around the corner, says Peter Diamandis, an aviation visionary who created the X-Prize, a $10 million bounty offered in 1996 for the first people to privately build and launch a spaceship capable of carrying three people to a 60 mile altitude, bring them back safely and repeat the launch, with the same craft, within two weeks.


He sees regular sub-orbital commercial flights by 2013. "We're on the verge of what you might call the golden age of space flight, where it will be possible for the general public to fly into space on a routine basis," he said. Bureau Report