The New Space Race

I N October 1957 Western public opinion was shocked by the launch of Russia 's Sputnik 1, the event that launched the first ``space race.'' The West felt it must follow suit or perish. But today the very notion of a ``race'' in space seems archaic. With the Soviet Union gone, who is going to race whom? ( China 's and Japan 's space programmes seem glacially slow.) It is hard to imagine how a nation would any longer wish to launch a spectacular mission in the cosmos just to humiliate a rival.  Today, with the prize-winning June 2004 flight of the privately owned Spaceship One, a second space race has begun, with many competitors. This race will have entirely different characteristics from the first.

Ingeniously summarised in a paper in the October JBIS (Vol. 59, pp. 364-367), these differences can be seen as follows: The motivation for the first space race was geo-politics, while that for the second will be profit. The actors in the first were governments. Those in the second will be private companies. The market environment in the first was government monopoly. (Some people in authority intensely opposed even the idea of private space travel and were resolved to prevent it), while the second will be dominated by commercial rivalry. Beneficiaries in the first were nations and political systems. Those in the second will be shareholders and consumers. No longer will space missions depend on ``political will'', or the votes of often self-interested politicians. They will depend on shareholders' funding, which in the long run will be much easier to obtain. And as for the effects on the rest of us, the comparisons soon become striking. The important missions of the first space age–the early manned orbital flights and the first Moon landings–caught people's imagination, but only for a short time. Pioneering astronauts like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were seen as heroes, while the names of those of the shuttle and space station era are barely known. But the privately-funded adventurers of the second space age, exploring parts of the solar system where no one has trod before, will enjoy the lasting fame of Drake and Raleigh or Lewis and Clark. Armstrong's boast on landing at Tranquillity Base that ``we came in peace for all mankind'' will at last come true as new planetary frontiers are opened ultimately to millions of tourists and adventurers. The private space industry still faces one tremendous challenge, the transition from a sub-orbital manned vehicle like SpaceShipOne, which flew only to 300,000 feet, to an inexpensive craft that can reach Earth orbit preferably with a single stage. Sub-orbital travel is a spectacular stunt, but when you are in Earth orbit you are half way to anywhere. The fledgling space tourism industry is in about the same position as the personal computer industry before 1980, when devices that we take for granted, like sound, high-speed data storage,  inter-machine communication and the mouse, did not yet exist. Many experts considered these machine toys with no future. But just as the successors to these small computers came to dominate world communications, so will private spaceships eventually dominate our solar system.