Space exploration today is a long way from the United States–Soviet Union space race in the 1960s. This means that the new space race isn’t between a couple of countries but among several players, particularly the fast-growing economies of China, India, and Japan.
Today the conversation is more centered on economic opportunities—the chance to create unique products in microgravity or to mine rare elements from the Moon or nearby asteroids. What remains the same, though, is national prestige.
Quoted from:
Howell, E. (2021). The New Space Race. In Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/explore/space/the-new-space-race/
The first space race was a competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for national pride and military advantage. Now NASA is farming out missions to private companies, and other countries have joined the race — notably China and India. The moon and Mars remain tantalizing goals for many nations, as are the technological advances that space exploration can drive.
Since the space shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA, as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is better known, had relied on Russia to ferry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station, which has orbited Earth for two decades. That changed in 2020 when billionaire Elon Musk’s company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, flew its first crewed missions, powered by reusable boosters that dramatically cut launch costs. Boeing Co.’s Starliner, a new capsule for astronauts designed to fly on the existing Atlas rocket, has been undergoing a major software revamp ahead of a planned second uncrewed test flight to the space station that NASA has scheduled for July 30. Depending on the outcome of that flight, Starliner may fly astronauts to the ISS late this year or in 2022.
Quoted from:
Bachman, J. (2021, July 13). New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-space-race-shoots-for-moon-and-mars-on-a-budget/2021/07/12/5bac6b04-e33a-11eb-88c5-4fd6382c47cb_story.html
Space exploration, the investigation, by means of crewed and uncrewed spacecraft, of the reaches of the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the use of the information so gained to increase knowledge of the cosmos and benefit humanity. A complete list of all crewed spaceflights, with details on each mission’s accomplishments and crew, is available in the section Chronology of crewed spaceflights.
Humans have always looked at the heavens and wondered about the nature of the objects seen in the night sky. With the development of rockets and the advances in electronics and other technologies in the 20th century, it became possible to send machines and animals and then people above Earth’s atmosphere into outer space. Well before technology made these achievements possible, however, space exploration had already captured the minds of many people, not only aircraft pilots and scientists but also writers and artists. The strong hold that space travel has always had on the imagination may well explain why professional astronauts and laypeople alike consent at their great peril, in the words of Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff (1979), to sit “on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse.” It perhaps also explains why space exploration has been a common and enduring theme in literature and art. As centuries of speculative fiction in books and more recently in films make clear, “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” was taken by the human spirit many times and in many ways before Neil Armstrong stamped humankind’s first footprint on the Moon.
Quoted from:
Logsdon, J. M. (2021, July 30). space exploration. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/science/space-exploration