The last moon landing took place in the early seventies, against a backdrop of waning interest in space exploration [1]. Fast-forward over 50 years, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Artemis mission to reach the moon, and eventually Mars, has been met with anything from excitement to conflicted indifference. There has been a fair bit of push-back about the whole program, with critics slating it as unnecessary spending [2] [3]. Former deputy administrator of NASA, Lori Garner, even stated: “I don’t believe the way we are going about it is sustainable because we are using outdated and expensive single-use technologies” [4].

This article will look at the current state of the new space race, and who is involved in it. 

Times have changed, and so have the frontrunners in the new space race. The original US/Soviet space race was largely motivated by a wish for military-tech supremacy [5], and fizzled out by the mid-70s amid political and economic fatigue. The space program was financially prohibitive, costing an estimated 150 billion dollars in modern terms [6]. NASA then spent the next few decades focusing on a variety of other projects such as the International Space Station and the Mars Rover robotic explorer.

NASA has now returned to the field with the Artemis program. In the NASA tradition of Greek mythological naming, their current space-race reboot is named after the twin sister of Apollo (their first space program). The Artemis mission has three stages: an unmanned test in 2022, a manned lunar orbit and return in 2024, and a manned lunar landing in 2025 [7] [8]. After a series of technological misfires, Artemis 1 launched from the Kennedy Space Center on November 16th, 2022. The unmanned capsule successfully touched back down on December 11th [9].

We mentioned this is a space race [10]; so, who are the other runners? China is also pursuing space travel, with advancing plans to build a lunar base with Russia, and building its own space station. In 2019, the China National Space Administration became the first agency to land a robotic craft on the dark side of the moon [11]. The state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology company also recently announced plans to update its rockets to handle manned lunar missions by 2030. This led to several Chinese space-related organizations being placed on the U.S. administration’s Entity List, restricting their access to U.S. technology [12].

Private industry also plays a role in space travel. SpaceX is a 20-year-old private company that designs and builds satellites and spaceships with a view to colonizing Mars [13]. They developed the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and complementary Crew Dragon spacecrafts, which contain many reusable parts. Their new Starship craft is at the cutting edge of space travel [14]. SpaceX is the first company to reuse a space rocket, and the first private company to dock a spacecraft at the International Space Station; with comparatively cheap, powerful, reusable rockets that apparently outperform anything currently being developed by NASA [15]. In stark contrast to NASA’s mostly one-time-only tech, this provides a fast turnaround for relaunches. There are several privately funded competitors of SpaceX and NASA [16], such as Blue Origin, who have developed a partially reusable space system [17].