This year marks half a century since the first astronauts landed on the moon, an incredible feat that saw the US cement its space race victory over the Soviet Union.
These days, there is talk of a new space race between the US and China, which recently landed a probe on the far side of the moon and has ambitious plans to send people there. But framing the new era of exploration beyond Earth as a nationalistic competition is an error. The superpower monopoly of space is over 鈥� increasingly, it is about the little guy too.
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Take SpaceIL, the Israeli start-up that recently launched the first private lunar lander (see 鈥�First private mission to the moon is launched on SpaceX rocket鈥�). Unable to fund its own rockets, the firm hitched a ride on one made by US-based SpaceX. They are cooperating, not competing.
Elsewhere in the solar system, Japan is carving out a niche as the world-leader in asteroid mining and exploration thanks to its Hayabusa 2 mission (see 鈥�Japan鈥檚 Hayabusa 2 bags its first sample from the asteroid Ryugu鈥�). JAXA, the nation鈥檚 space agency, has more experience than NASA in this area, but no one is talking about a US-Japan race.
Space, as author Douglas Adams once wrote, is big. There is room for everyone.
