Elon Musk VS Nasa VS China: Billionaire’s flex financial muscle in new-age space race
The new age space race has seen private firms, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dutch company Mars One, enter the foyer in recent years, while Europe has also upped the ante, along with China and Russia’s space program. But is that changing? Over the course of 2016, there has been a change in momentum, with space exploration no longer a matter of national pride, but to which billionaire’s financial muscle is the strongest. Elon Musk and his SpaceX recently succeeded in landing reusable rockets, while he also has his sights set on being the first to get humans on Mars.
GETTY Elon Musk and other billionaires have entered the space race
GETTY Getting people to Mars has been the focus for many
Mars One shares similar ambition, despite the noise around that slowly quietening throughout the year. Another contender, which has not kicked up a huge fuss and has been doing its business under the radar is Blue Origin – founded by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos – which wants to make space exploration available to the general public in the near future. Simon Foster, a physicist from Imperial College London, confirmed to Express.co.uk: “The next space race will not just be between countries, it will be between countries and private billionaires.”
While most of the focus this year has been about getting people to Mars, there have been projects which have not been greeted with as much fanfare. On September 15, China cemented itself as a space exploration powerhouse by firing its space laboratory Tiangong 2 into low Earth orbit, becoming only the third nation, after the US and Russia, to independently get people in to space. President of China, Xi Jinping, said that the mission would "enable China to take larger and further steps in space exploration, and make new contributions to building up China as a space power”. But, “I wouldn’t say they’ll exceed the US”, Dr Foster continued.
GETTY China put its Tiangong II space lab in orbit
“The US, I think [space exploration] is their crown jewels and they know far more of what is going on.” Dr Foster describes some of Nasa’s upcoming project as “properly bonkers”, with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) a particularly exciting prospect. There has been little hype around ARM, which is set to launch in the mid-2020s, but Nasa hopes to tow part of an asteroid and place it in orbit around the moon. This way they can study what they are made of, for mining purposes, use it as preparation for landing people on Mars and study whether they should destroy or deflect asteroids that are on a potential collision course with Earth.
GETTY Asteroid mining and deflection is in the pipeline for Nasa
As such, Dr Foster expects Nasa to remain the world’s dominant force in space exploration. He stated: “What NASA has got coming is absolutely amazing. It will be a huge leap forward.”
Historic Images from the Space Race Fri, December 4, 2015 Take a look through history with the first rocket launch in 1950 from Cape Canaveral, all the way to Neil Armstrong preparing to take his first step on the Earth’s moon and the iconic placing of the flag. Play slideshow NASA 1 of 12 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon in 1969