While the space race of the 1960s was a contest between two rival superpowers, today it is being fought by private space firms and billionaires battling for bragging rights. And the winner will be whoever lands man, not on the moon, but on Mars
20:22, 20 Mar 2025Updated 20:32, 20 Mar 2025
The dramatic rescue of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station has added another incredible chapter to the history of space exploration. But the fact they were brought back from their unplanned nine-month stay not by their government but by private companies shows just how much space travel has changed.
In the 1960s it was a contest between two superpowers. Today it is fought by private space firms and billionaires. And the winner will be whoever lands someone, not on the moon, but on Mars.
Coincidentally, the day of Suni and Butch’s soft splashdown off Florida’s coast also marked 60 years since the Soviet Union beat the USA to win one of the most coveted early space race prizes - the first spacewalk.
On March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made history - and left the Americans fuming - as he floated for 12 minutes in the dark vacuum of space, 310 miles above the Earth. It was only decades later when Leonov revealed how the spacewalk, hastily arranged when they heard the Americans were planning their own, had nearly gone catastrophically wrong.
In his autobiography, the astronaut remembered: “I was walking in space, the first man to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe. At the same time I felt enormously powerful, high above the surface of the earth I felt the power of the human intellect that had placed me there.”
But in an interview in 2014, five years before he died, he told how after several minutes, the vacuum of space caused his spacesuit to expand and stiffen, leaving him unable to move or pull himself back to the craft. “I felt my spacesuit begin to deform. My hands had slipped out of my gloves and my feet from my boots,” he recalled. “I had to do something with my gloves as I couldn’t pull on the cord, and the suit was so big I would not fit back through the airlock.”
Alexei said he was already beginning to succumb to decompression sickness, while his core-body temperature had jumped 35c within minutes, pushing his body to the edge of heatstroke. When the command centre realised what was happening, the TV transmission was ended abruptly and replaced with the solemn music of Mozart’s Requiem. He managed to depressurise the suit by opening a valve to release half the oxygen, before pulling himself back inside the spacecraft.
Sadly, the first astronaut to die during a spaceflight was another Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who perished in April 1967 when the parachute of the landing capsule of his Soyuz 1 mission failed to open. Setbacks aside, the Soviet Union was then far ahead of the USA in the space race, launching the first satellite, Sputnik, into space in October 1957, then the first living organism, a dog named Laika, and the first human, cosmonaut, Yuri Gagrin, in April 1961.
Other Soviet firsts included the first crewed spaceflight, the first person to orbit the Earth, the first woman in space and the first ever space centre. The Soviets were planning to land on the moon in 1967, but the unexpected illness and death of one of its most competent cosmonauts, Sergei Korolev, put their plans on pause. And the USA to leapt into the lead when, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first human steps on another planet, widely considered the greatest moment in human history.
Again, the rush to beat the Soviets meant going ahead with the daring mission despite safety concerns, including the possibility that the astronauts would get stranded on the moon’s surface.
Thirty years after Apollo II’s successful moon landing, an undelivered speech prepared for President Nixon surfaced. He was to read it out in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin couldn’t return home, and ended up having to commit suicide or starve to death.
It reads: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men know there is no hope for their recovery. They are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding.”
Luckily, the speech was not delivered. But, two years before the moon landing, in January 1967, three US astronauts - including Ed White, who had become the first American to walk in space - did perish in a fireball on the launch pad of the Apollo 1 mission.
And in 1971, all three of the Soviet’s Soyuz mission crew died when their capsule depressurised before re-entry, as they travelled back from humanity’s first stay on a space station, Salyut 1. The Soyuz spacecraft are still used today to transport Russian crews to the International Space Station.
The first moon landing effectively ended the space race, although it was formally concluded on July 19, 1975, when the US and Soviet Union docked two spacecraft together in orbit and shook hands during the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, which created the International Space Station.
American astronaut Vance Brand later said: We [the Americans] thought they [the Soviets] were pretty aggressive people and … they probably thought we were monsters. So we very quickly broke through that, because when you deal with people that are in the same line of work as you are, and you’re around them for a short time, you discover that, well, they’re human beings.”
But 50 years on, a new space race is hotting up - only this time it’s the battle of the billionaires and private companies, rather than governments, leading the charge. SpaceX and Boeing were the names people were citing - not Nasa - as Suni and Butch’s spacecraft splashed down.
Others firms joining the race include Lockheed Martin, worth £84billion, which has sent rovers to Mars and vows to send humans there within a decade, and the £55billion Northrup Grumman, responsible for putting the James Webb Space Telescope - which is providing unprecedented views of the universe - into orbit.
We have also seen the dawn of space tourism, led by companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, allowing anyone - as long as they are mega rich - to travel into space.
Today more than 70 countries have their own national space agencies, with China now the US’s biggest rival. In 2023 India landed an unmanned craft on the moon’s south pole for the first time, while newcomers include Vietnam and Bolivia.
And the speed of this race eclipses anything that happened in the Cold War. The net worth of the global space industry grew at its fastest pace ever in the last decade to reach a record £358billion in 2021, and it’s projected to reach £1.3trillion by 2035.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX appears to be leading the charge - valued at an incredible £135billion, thanks to contracts with Nasa and a plan to not just be the first to send humans to Mars, but to colonise the planet. Musk boldly claimed this week that humankind’s first steps on Mars could be as close as four years away, and that a million people could be living on the planet in just 20 years.
In an interview following his company’s successful rescue of the stranded astronauts,Musk said SpaceX’s Starship will head to Mars at the end of 2026, and if all goes well human landing may start “as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely”.
He added: “We are going to take astronauts to Mars, in fact we want to take anyone who goes to Mars. And ultimately build a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars, that is the long-term goal of the company. I think we could do it in 20 to 30 years.”