The New Space Race

 The New Space Race 

2020

Let’s talk about the new race for space. Countries and companies are competing to develop brand new space technology. Right now, engineers are designing space colonies. It’s time to go back to the moon. This time, to stay. France and the US have even launched their own space force. A space force  as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That’s a big statement. So in this race, who could win and what’s the big prize? And why should we care about what’s happening up there? Let’s take a second to realise how close the future actually is.

  Space tourism is taking off. Billionaire Richard Branson just made his commercial space airline publicly-traded company of its kind Virgin Galactic the first publicly-traded company of its kind. Our little company is going to be floating in space next year and today it's floating on the stock market. And earlier this year, he opened a spaceport in New Mexico where customers who’ve paid 250,000 dollars each will soon board space-planes to Earth’s sub-orbit. You’ve probably also heard of the billionaire Elon Musk and his company SpaceX. He’s unveiled detailed plans to start construction on Mars  in just 30 years time. We want to just keep improving rocket technology until there’s a city on Mars. Now I know it all sounds incredibly ambitious.  But big ideas can become very real, very quickly. It’s happened before, during the first space race. 

In the 1950s, the US and Soviet Union  were locked in a Cold War over political ideology. “President Truman signs a bill to spend   over 3 billion dollars to fight communism”.  Both sides started developing bigger and better rocket technology to use in a potential nuclear war and to keep each other in check. But they quickly took that fight to space. “Space travel became headline news with the announcement  that the United States plan to launch their first satellite by 1957”.  But the Soviets beat them to it by launching Sputnik a tiny satellite that Washington feared   could zip over the US and gather intelligence. Four years later, the Soviet Union made history again  by putting the first human in space.  But soon enough, US President John F. Kennedy raised the stakes. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. In 1969, NASA put the first humans on the moon. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. As to who won that, I think it's pretty clear that the USA won that race.  But it wasn't just about national prestige in a simple flag-waving sense. That's why there was such an emphasis on the various scientific instruments that were flown with the Apollo missions. 

What followed that first space race were, in fact, many  decades of science-driven space exploration.  Countries even collaborated with each other’s space programs to send space stations, telescopes, probes   and satellites across our solar system. NASA stayed in the lead, partly because of its space shuttle.  But over time, governments around the world  started pouring less money into their space programs. Including the US.  Eventually, NASA retired the shuttle for good in 2011. And in the meantime, new space powers emerged. Countries like China and India, who have  been pouring millions of dollars into their space programs. China and India are basically trying to one up each other in terms of getting into record books, with China going to the far side of the moon and India trying to land rovers on other planets. Which show a country's technological  progress, which turns into geostrategic influence. 

But it’s private companies, and the pockets of billionaires who’ve really been heating up the race. SpaceX has built the world’s first reusable rocket. And the company has been working with NASA to transport cargo to the International Space Station. The airplane manufacturer Boeing and a company called Blue Origin owned by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, are also competing for contracts. So are dozens of other start-ups around the world, including  RocketLab in New Zealand and iSpace in Japan. And the idea is that if companies can profit, science does too. The big prize obviously for any private entity is to be profitable and make a  business. Space is very hard. It's very expensive for us. For example, it's  doing really important things that really benefit humanity in some ways and make a profit. And the rewards could potentially be enormous. NASA believes there are nearly 800,000 asteroids in our solar system which contain valuable metals like gold, iron and platinum. And just one of those asteroids, called 16 Psyche, is thought to have about 700 quintillion US dollars worth of valuable materials. There are also very real plans to mine the moon for water and Helium-3. Which could both potentially be transformed into rocket fuel. It allows us to resupply our missions to Mars and we can even refuel orbiting satellites of Earth. 

And, guess what? Laws have already been drafted in the US and Luxembourg   to allow companies to keep what they mine on the moon, Mars or anywhere else. Companies aren't going to invest their money if they think that whatever they are able to mine belongs to mankind. They want it to belong to them. And the United States passed a legislation which basically said, "Okay we're good with that". And there was some international criticism of “why does it belong to you? And that leads us to another prize in this race, which is power. Even after the Cold War, space exploration has in some ways been driven by the military.  Now, government officials, military officials are saying that they would like  to have weapons developed and deployed by 2023.

 SpaceCom will defend America’s vital interests in space the next war-fighting domain. But there are no actual weapons in space. Yet. There is an internationally agreed “Outer Space Treaty” to stop weapons of mass destruction from being used in space.  We have very few guidelines. There are no weapons of mass destruction to be placed in outer space, we are not to militarise the moon. But other than that, it's open territory.  Already, the US, Russia, China and India have carried out what they call “anti-satellite missile tests” by destroying old satellites in space. For now though, countries and companies say they are putting science first. And that’s a good thing because it’ll push the boundaries of human technology and could bring us  the answers to life’s big questions. And unlike the last space race, this time there seems to be more room for everyone. Hopefully that means everybody wins.