📚The TL;DR📝

1. The Space Race: Competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for international scientific prestige and military dominance in space.

2. The original Space Race saw the Soviets achieve the first spacecraft and the first person in space, but the American landing on the moon ended it and created a new era of cooperation. 

3. This era of cooperation was defined by the International Space Station, which has hosted thousands of scientists and hundreds of astronauts from dozens of countries.

4. But now, the ISS is soon to be decommissioned, and competition in space is growing both from aggressive states and private companies, making it a new frontier for strategic competition.

5. Space investment is now a national security requirement, but the loss of the global partnership in the ISS is a loss for science and technological development. 

📌The Return of the Space Race📌

The ISS will crash into the ocean. Not on a sci-fi movie, but when it is decommissioned and deorbited, potentially in the next five years. As the International Space Station nears its 25th anniversary, an era of multilateral cooperation is drawing to a close. New players have entered the space race, and space has become increasingly militarized, ensuring the need for U.S. forays into spatial defense systems.  China and Russia alone have launched thousands of satellites into arctic orbit in just the past three years. 

As international space budgets have grown and governments adopt new technologies, older collaborative institutions like the Space Station risk obsolescence, threatening backsliding on international space cooperation. New security implications for intercontinental missiles, communications networks, and the ability to settle the moon need this cooperation more than ever in an increasingly multipolar world.

Blast Off

Post World War II, rising ideological tensions between the U.S. and the USSR pulled the nations into the Cold War. While their communist and democratic proxies engaged in physical conflicts, the two main powers competed for control of the world–and space.

Soviet engineer Sergei Korlev officially began the Space Race when he completed the construction of the very first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R7. The USSR followed up this achievement and sent Sputnik into space on October 4, 1957 as the first artificial orbiting satellite. On November 3, they solidified their lead when Sputnik II carried Laika the dog into space.

The United States had to respond. The first step was bureaucratic; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in October 1958.  Still, the U.S. remained in the USSR’s shadow. In 1959, the Soviet Luna 2 landed on the moon. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Later that same year, the Soviets achieved the first spacewalk and put the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, on Vostok 6.

There was one last record for the U.S. to try to take: putting a man on the moon. President John F. Kennedy spurred the nation up to the task. Project Gemini launched Americans into space for the first time, and Project Apollo, which brought astronauts into orbit around the moon. On July 29, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, making Neil Armstrong the first person to step out on earth’s only natural satellite. 

To add to the victory, Soviet bureaucracy stalled their own efforts to send astronauts to the moon. Instead, a new era of collaboration began.. In 1971, the USSR launched the Mir Orbital Station, the first space station., The Space Race symbolically ended in 1975, when an American Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docked together in space. 

Peace on the Final Frontier?

The approval of the International Space Station (ISS) by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 started a new era of international space collaboration. Space collaboration went from being a U.S.-Soviet venture to a truly international effort.  Joint construction efforts between the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, and Europe led to a two phase procedural rollout of the station.

The first phase, Shuttle-Mir , lasted from 1995 to 1998. Eleven space shuttles brought astronauts and cosmonauts alike to Mir, which housed them during the construction of the new ISS. 

Continuous occupation of the ISS since 2000 heralded a new era of active space collaboration and investigation. It has hosted over 280 astronauts from 26 countries, who have conducted over 4,000 scientific investigations included in 4,400 published papers. 

Now, the station is larger than a football field and has added thirteen modules from a plethora of nations to the original American three. This physical linkage symbolized the relationships between diplomatic forces back on earth–groups willing to come together in goodwill for research benefitting all mankind. However, the costs have grown too, especially with recent maintenance. Total costs estimations range from $100 billion up to $250 billion, not counting the opportunity costs of any resources siphoned away from moon or Mars projects. 

Many nations, in the face of rising global polarization and nationalism, do not see a payoff in these increasing costs.The ISS faces decommissioning in 2030, if not sooner. Its lifespan has already stretched beyond initial estimates. Russia has already said it will withdraw from the ISS to focus on building its own station by 2028. In America, at least, commercial space stations are the path forward in orbital operations, especially as private-public partnerships abound in efforts to create moon landers. 

Space: Corporate and Competitive

Private companies, at least in America, appear ready to pick up the slack in the investment-heavy space industry. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, are designing and testing larger rockets and lunar landers for future NASA moon missions, which would be the first to return humans to the moon since 1972.

SpaceX currently has the lunar lander contract for the Artemis III mission, but NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy criticized them for delays. Now, the agency is evaluating plans for human landing systems from both SpaceX and Blue Origin to accelerate lunar mission rollout. 

Right now, Blue Origin has a $835 million contract to work on their own lunar lander. According to USA Spending, SpaceX has already collected $2.7 billion from NASA for their lunar lander, and should they hit all targets, could receive another $1.5 billion. 

Space has also become increasingly militarized. After a 60-year pause, China, Russia, and the United States have all developed and tested anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles since 2007, meant to quickly disable both the civilian and military communications handled by satellites.

While the three great powers prepare to shoot down satellites, they have also expanded their investment in military satellites.. . The United States contracted Northrop Grumman for over $4.1 billion in 2024 as part of the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM). Since 2022, Russia, China, and the U.S. have launched around three thousand polar satellites, which pass over every spot on the globe. In the far north, satellites are visible at least fourteen times a day.  The new satellites  are crucial to detect ICBMs,  which would cross over the Arctic. 

China has more than just polar satellites: excluded from the ISS due to U.S. national security concerns, China launched its own space station, Tiangong I, in 2011. A more advanced Chinese lander is already set to touch down on the moon’s south pole in 2028, preempting ambitions for a permanent base. Power is preceded by presence. To outlast other nations’ longevity in orbit, the U.S. must be prepared to employ more suitable energy sources.

🌎Why It Matters🌎

It is no longer possible to dismiss space exploration and capabilities as a vanity project of the government or hobby of astrophiles. As technology develops, frontiers that once seemed uncrossable unfurl their secrets one day at a time. Space defense is a concrete budget item for many nations. For example, on Nov. 19, Germany announced the $35 billion expansion of its space security infrastructure to better protect its interests. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius argued this investment was necessary to defend Germany, by safeguarding communications against GPS signal disruptions by Russia in the Baltic Sea region.

And while much of NASA’s purview seems abstract from our day-to-day lives, they are an important accelerator of scientific knowledge. Some zero-gravity projects conducted on the ISS include manufacturing artificial retinas, growing drug protein crystal structures, 3-D printing living tissue for transplants, and studying chemotherapy’s efficacy on cancer cells, as cells grow more quickly when weightless. 

Astronauts gained skills in spacewalking and assembly work, and guided improvements in spacesuit tech. Crews learned the long-term effects of space on the human body–an accelerated form of aging.  Beyond individual views on the success of space research and development, international actions dictate that the space race is a critical security spending sector. Clear long-term goals and accountability for contracted companies are necessary to ensure the industry does not misuse its capabilities. 

In an increasingly polarized world, the potential decommissioning of the ISS means more than just a temporary step away from zero-g research projects. The largest man-made structure in space, it stands for a bygone era of global cooperation that seems quaint today. It’s no coincidence that the current race to establish satellite communications in the Arctic operates mostly on a per-country basis. When the ISS astronauts return to earth for the final time, 25 years of continuous space presence ends. It is imperative that those 25 years of cooperation do not fade into nothingness.