The New Space Race
The competitors might surprise you
The US and China are clearly competitors. Military, Trade, Investment, Technology, you name the topic and I guarantee you can find a news story about US-China competition. But this article is about a lesser known competition. The type of competition between siblings, a fight to the death, but with an embrace at the end. Let’s talk about the New US-Europe Space Race.
In 1977, President Carter wrote a statement that traveled with the Voyager spacecraft. If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage that you read it; I’m quoting it in full below:
“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
I think President Carter’s statement was an act of cunning diplomacy. Make sure the aliens know that although we are one human civilization, it was the United States in particular who shot this rocket into space. It was a poetic ending to the US-Soviet space race. In the turn of the new millennia, nation’s were largely cooperative when it came to space. Fifteen nations are part of the International Space Station programme today. Even as war rages in Ukraine, there are currently five Russian cosmonauts in the ISS with four US astronauts. To be a fly on the wall for those conversations… But three decades of space cooperation might be coming to a close. Russia has said they intend to leave the ISS in 2024, and China (who calls their space-dwellers taikonauts) has been banned from ISS participation (they were never a member in the first place) since 2011. But perhaps in the most surprising development, Europe has bolstered their internal space investments and have made it clear that these investments are not just designed to compete with China, but the US too. Like a rocket leaving Cape Canaveral, the Space Race is heating up.
So why does Europe believe they are poised to be a serious competitor in the 21st Century Space Race?
- A new €16.9 Billion European Space Agency budget (~€5.6B per year)
- A new mandate to invest government dollars in European space companies and their R&D
- An estimated 3,000 privately funded startups which supply European space missions in some way.
On the surface, most agree these moves are not going to be enough to compete with the US. NASA’s most recent annual budget was $29 Billion. President Biden is reportedly drafting an executive order that will streamline approvals for private rocket launches. The major US defense companies have all released comprehensive space strategies, and you have SpaceX and Blue Origin leading the billionaire space wars.
SpaceX is a particular thorn for the Europeans. Before SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, Europe’s Ariane vehicles were number one in commercial space launches. One of the key goals of the European Space Agency’s new budget is to rehab the Ariane and Vega rockets to be more competitive with their US contemporaries.
In total, Europe is unlikely to compete with the US or China in this new space race. But they have fabricated a path forward which could give them key wins in specific domains.
One such program is the IRIS2, a satellite network that provides secure and encrypted communication for government and military use cases in Europe. They also plan to use the IRIS2 to expand strategic internet access in Africa. This one could be particularly important as Africa increasingly becomes the world stage for cold-war style investments and interventions by the US and China.
In the end, one thing is certain. European officials want to chart their own course in space, independent of the US. Whether this talk is replaced with significant progression is unclear, but Europe wants the world to know. The 21st century space race is most certainly a three-way race.
