IMO perhaps toward the end of the century at best. My reasoning here is that space activity is likely heading into a contraction mid-century as the economic drag of climate change impacts compels a revision of the prestige-driven approach of contemporary space agencies. Some will be consolidated into national science programs. Some will not survive at all. Consider, a great many space center facilities are in endangered coastal locations. KSC will, most certainly, be inundated by the end of the century. Yet NASA has no established plans for the relocation of its facilities --the politicization of climate long making the subject impossible to discuss. How well will space program budgets fair when the insurance industry starts abandoning whole regions of the country, Dust Bowl style mass migrations begin, and Washington DC starts looking like Venice on a seasonal basis with outrageous civil engineering follies being proposed to preserve it and the other centers of power, commerce, culture, and upper-class property?

I feel that for space development to progress at all during this century there is going to have to be a radical re-think of how space activity is supposed to work. The racket of throwing bodies into the void for its own sake is not going to persist. The money won't be there. Space development will become increasingly reliant on tele/robotics, in-space production, and high-flexibility-launch (possibly at sea) as a means to driving down costs and operational scales by commoditizing and driving down payload values or replacing terrestrial payloads altogether. (payload values drive launch costs by driving reliability overhead. There's a Tyranny of the Reliability Equation just as there is a Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. CATS was never about rocket technology, but logistics) To survive, space will have to become something you can do at a university level, and I think it will.