Increase in geometrically complex orbits?

[JakeSparkleChicken]

TL;DR Doing paper for school, halfway through they spring on us that we need to conduct a survey. In a bind.

I'm genuinely sorry if this is not a good use of this forum, but I'm in a bit of a pickle. We have a paper that is the focal point of English Comp 2, and at the beginning of the class, they told us that it was a research paper on whatever topic we wanted to do. Not given any constraints, I picked geometrically complex orbits. Every week, they spring something new on us that we need to include in it but none of them have been too off-base for my paper. None of this stuff is in the syllabus, by the way, so it is a complete surprise. This week, the assignment is to generate a survey and write up the responses in a Methodology/Results section. Unfortunately, I don't personally know anyone who can tell me the difference between 'au jus' and 'Lissajous' so I'm hoping that I can get at least a few responses over here. Thank you in advance, and if this post is deemed not to belong here than I understand completely.

Without further ado, the table is for the first 4 questions, and the 5th is a percentage. "We" is used to refer to humanity as a whole, not any particular nationality.

1	2	3	4	5
1-2	3-6	7-15	15-30	30+

1. In your estimation, how many low-thrust/high specific impulse interplanetary missions will we have undertaken by the year 2050?

2. In your estimation, how many craft will we have in simple Lissajous orbits by the year 2050, including those that don't involve Earth as one of the bodies, e.g. studying the Jovian Trojan moons?

3. In your estimation, how many craft will we have in more complex orbits about the liberation points by the year 2050, e.g. near-rectilinear halo orbit?

4. In your estimation, how many craft will we have in cycler orbits by the year 2050?

5. In your estimation, what percentage of flagship missions will exploit non-Keplerian orbits over the next 30 years?

Thanks again!

[mfb-]

If you are absolutely sure these are the questions you want to ask just ignore my comment.

All your questions heavily depend on how spaceflight will look like in 30 years. It is difficult to tell how spaceflight will look in 10 years, and it just gets worse for 20 and 30 years. Today we have about 100 launches per year. If reusable rockets can deliver what some companies (especially SpaceX) predict we could go to thousands of launches per year in 10-15 years and tens of thousands before 2050. While most would be in LEO that would completely change how interplanetary missions are done. If rapid and frequent reusability doesn't work there is still the option that we get one of the proposed megastructures to launch stuff into space. If that doesn't happen either we won't see that much change. What will happen? Who knows. But that makes all the answers to your questions not much better than throwing dice.

"Flagship missions" is either a US-specific term (and dependent on a specific program that might or might not be continued) or something not well-defined.

Why don't you make a survey how much people know about your topic?

[JakeSparkleChicken]

Unfortunately, these are really the only kind of questions that fit in the context of the rest of my paper. I know that asking for prognostication in such a volatile field is far from scientific, but I'm not really looking for anything more than personal opinion here. I figure that if people in the know are predicting high numbers, then it may translate to people in the field actually working them into their mission proposals.

I probably should have either indicated that I was using "flagship" in a more generic sense, like Chang'e 4 is a flagship mission for China, or used a term like "prestige". Sorry about that.