As Chinese wheels touch Martian soil and Indian astronauts make their way to the launch pad, can we hope for another space race?

If you were born in the 1960s or early 1970s, chances are that somewhere in your childhood lurks the desire to be an astronaut or cosmonaut. After Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth and Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon, millions of children imagined that they too would one day climb into a space capsule and join this elite group of explorers. fearless. Anything seems possible when you’re five, but of course the reality remains that only the very few of us have ever been to space.

Have you ever dreamed of the stars?

The picture may be a little different for young people a few decades later, were kids in the 90s dreaming of the stars? Probably not. So what changed when the Shuttle and Mir crews passed overhead?

The answer is that the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had dominated alien exploration from the 1950s to the 1970s, had cooled by then, and impressive as the construction of the International Space Station, it lacked the ability to electrify the public like Sputnik, Vostok or Apollo. It was immensely cool for people like us, but the general public was distracted by other things and their political leaders were no longer ready to approve moot budgets. We had made space, and other than the occasional bright spot in the form of space telescopes or rovers crossing Mars, that was it. The hit television series The Big Bang Theory even had a storyline that found comedy in one of its characters serving on the ISS mission and completely ignored upon his return.

A few years ago, a Chinese friend from my hackerspace at the time was really surprised that I knew the name of Yang Liwei, the Shenzhou 5 astronaut and the first person his country launched into space. He’s a national hero in China but not so much on the rainy edge of Europe, where the Chinese space program for all its progress at the time about a decade after Yang’s mission had yet to make a splash in the- beyond a few space observers and hackerspaces enthusiasts. But that could start to change.

Everyone is throwing rockets it seems

As we approach two decades since Shenzhou 5, it seems that China’s space program has rarely been out of the limelight. On the Moon last year, the latest in their ongoing Chang’e series of probes successfully retrieved surface samples and sent them back to Earth, while eagerly awaiting a deal with the Russians to cooperate on a forward – lunar station inhabited in the 2030s.

In Earth orbit, the Tianhe module that will form the heart of the next Tiangong series space station has received its first crew and will be supplemented by other modules over the next year. Meanwhile on Mars, their Zhurong rover landed on the Red Planet aboard the Tianwen-1 mission and impressed us with photos of its landing site, and there are ambitious plans for return missions from samples and a possible human presence in the 2030s.

The variety and pace of these side missions is immediately reminiscent of the Cold War era space race and at first glance seem far more ambitious than its Western counterparts, but of course the Chinese agenda is not the only one. to point its rockets at the sky. Russian space agency Roscosmos will no longer be involved in the ISS after 2025 and will bring its many decades of experience building its own in-orbit outpost, while India’s ISRO agency will pursue both its Martian orbiter Maangalyaan and its Chandrayaan lunar programs and continues the test program leading to a planned crew in orbit aboard the Gaganyaan spacecraft in 2022. If we thought that a two-pronged space race was exciting, one with four or even five participants should spark the world’s interest like never before!

So, given the likely number of skyward craft from China, India, and Russia, what does it look like on the side of the planet where Hackaday’s headquarters are located? We have seen enough coverage of the ISS and the various contenders for ferrying crew and supplies, NASA Mars rovers and other scientific devices to know that US and European space exploration efforts are alive and well. . But if we are in a space race, how will their near future compare to others? For this, the special sauce comes in two forms; international cooperation in the form of the Artemis program, and the crafts and parts of private sector companies that will be part of it. This has a noble goal of getting humans back to the Moon by 2024, and its first mission will launch an unmanned test capsule aboard an SLS rocket to orbit the Moon and return home, in November of this year.

Maybe you don’t have to be a nation state to run in space

Meanwhile, all the hype remains about Elon Musk’s Martian plans, who at least satisfied any need we may have had to see mega-rocket prototypes crash into the Texan countryside. Aside from the billionaire scramble for the ultimate space toys, the arrival of SpaceX, Blue Origin and their many rivals signals a new and unprecedented aspect of this space race that could not have happened five decades ago. It is likely that the market for smaller satellite launches will largely shift to the private sector over the next few years, but on the space exploration side, this is increasing the number of players outside the Kingdom of the States. nations. Parts for U.S. spacecraft have been made by private aerospace contractors for decades, but the work was done under the auspices of NASA rather than by a company. What will be the effect of a space race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for example, a dystopian corporate nightmare or a fresh and dynamic competition for these other nations? Time will tell, but one thing is certain: there will be plenty for space observers to consume.

It is said that there was disillusionment among members of the Apollo-era astronaut and cosmonaut corps during the 1970s as enthusiasm for space exploration waned and the next shutdown of humanity remained firmly in orbit rather than against a Martian horizon. It is therefore normal that some of them are still alive to see the start of a new space race, and that the seed is planted in children all over the world, which will lead some of them into careers that will fuel space exploration towards the end of the century. Most of us will probably be too old to wish to be an astronaut or cosmonaut by now, but if the last space race is going to happen, we’re going to be enjoying ourselves as spectators with this one.

Header image: L-BBE, CC BY 3.0.