Are we in the middle of a new space race for this century?

The space age began as a race to the moon between the US and the Soviet Union, with the US pulling off a come-from-behind win when the Apollo 11 crew walked on the surface of the moon in 1969. Since then, people have constantly talked about what the next big space race would be, and who would be the major players. But the space industry is no longer just two national programs vying for dominance. It’s more complicated than ever before.

The US remains the preeminent space power in the world, but China, in the last couple of decades has poured an insane amount of money into its space program. The country has run its own crewed space station program since 2012. It has landed two spacecraft on the moon and has another one launching in 2020. NASA's Artemis lunar program was arguably spurred by China's public desires to go to the moon as well. So to that extent, yes, there's a new space race between China and the US.

But again, the race is more complicated than that. Russia wants to send people to the moon as well, so do ESA and Japan. Israel and India have their own lunar ambions, although they are much farther behind.

There are also private companies all over the world, from SpaceX to Blue Origin, with their own ambitions to go to the moon. These companies aren't necessarily driven by the same kinds of geopolitical goals as the national programs, but instead by a desire to make money. So you could agree that this race also includes new competitors from the private sector as well.

Apart from the moon. All the aforementioned countries are planing to be the first to get to Mars, in fact, SpaceX could be the first group to send people to the Red Planet, beating out the national programs.

There is a lot happening within the space industry, and all of it is interconnected. There's constant collaboration between different groups, and even rivals (like the US and Russia), and there are different goals for different groups or organizations, so it would be unreasonable to call it a new space race of some kind between two or more parties. But different parties are definitely competing for certain achievements which could end up in dozens of "space races" in dozens of areas.

Source: MIT Technology Review