Space Race

Overview

The Space Race is the birthplace of modern space travel technology. Most of today's space organizations are a consequence of the intense competition between the USA and Soviet Union between 1957 and 1975. The Space Race involved the efforts to send humans into space, insert satellites into Earth orbit and to send man to the Moon. Primarily driven by military intentions, most launch vehicles were based on ballistic missile systems as developed for nuclear strikes (see ICBM). This consequently formed the basis of all launch vehicles for Mars and other planetary missions (excepting the Space Shuttle), up to the new Space 2.0 age.

With an end of the space race came a period of cooperation, culminating in the jointly built International Space station. This was also a long period of quasi stagnation, with few innovations and a very limited access to space.

Space 2.0 began somewhere in the 2010 decade. It is a new period of competition for space access, this time in the North American private space sector, with some small players from other countries. The competition has taken place on the fronts of fabrication methods, reusability of the launch systems and significantly lower costs for the access to space. As the race is currently in progress, the end results are not known. However, if SpaceX meets its goals for the production and operations of the Starship transportation system, the cost of Mars access might eventually go down three orders of magnitude, from 130 000 $/kg to 130 $/kg (2016 SpaceX projection).