You may not have given a lot of thought to your plans for 2024, but more and more people in the space business have. For reasons not entirely clear, 2024 has become the big year for big promises.

The trend started in 2017 with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who stunned an international astronomy conference in Adelaide, Australia with his announcement that a new mega-rocket he was building could have human beings on Mars within seven years. Skeptics questioning how he arrived at that date speculated that it might have been a simple matter of subtraction. NASA had recently revealed that it was looking at 2034 for its own first Mars landing, so Musk, being Musk, just subtracted a decade and made his announcement. Either way, as with many of his other big predictions, he soon stopped talki…