52 The Economist July 17th 2021
International
America,ChinaandtheMoonThe eagle and the rabbit
O
n july11th, climbing through the dark
ling sky like a bolt of lightning in re
verse, Richard Branson stole a whisper of
Jeff Bezos’s thunder.
In early June Mr Bezos had garnered
headlines and pageviews by announcing
that when his rocket company, Blue Origin,
launched a space capsule with humans on
board for the first time on July 20th he
would be among those passengers. Virgin
Galactic, a company founded by Sir Rich
ard, had already flown its rocketplane Un-
ityto the edge of space. Plans were quickly
hatched to bring its next test flight forward
and to put Sir Richard himself on the crew
manifest (he had been planning to take a
later flight). On July 11th Unitydid its thing,
and Sir Richard, returned to Earth, pro
claimed a new space age open (see Busi
ness section). Blue Origin tweeted, snarki
ly if accurately, that its capsule goes higher
and has bigger windows.
If Mr Bezos has lost his precedence, he
has kept his date. And that matters. July
20th is the anniversary of the first landing
of a crewed spacecraft on the Moon: that of
the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, in 1969.As such it was, for a long time, a date for
retrospection. But now it is also a date for
looking forward.
There is every reason to think that, by
the time Apollo 11’s 60th anniversary rolls
around at the end of this decade, American
astronauts will once again be leaving foot
prints on the barren lunar plains. And
while Sir Richard has no realistic human
spaceflight ambitions beyond tourist
flights to the top of the atmosphere, Mr Be
zos wants Blue Origin to play a big role in
that next great adventure.
A place for the private initiative of Mr
Bezos and those like him is one of the ways
in which the plans and context for Ameri
ca’s return to the Moon differ from those
that saw it first go there—and then stop go
ing there—half a century ago. There are
many others. One of the goals of the Arte
mis programme, as nasa’s backtothe
Moon programme is known, is to highlight
the ways in which America has changed in
the intervening decades. Another is to be
comparatively cheap. Whereas Apollo had
to be a uniquely American achievement,
Artemis will encourage the participationof allies. And rather than providing just a
few brief visits, Artemis is meant to lead to
the creation of permanent outposts.
One thing remains the same. Artemis,
like Apollo, is shaped by the geopolitics of
greatpower rivalry—then between Ameri
ca and the Soviet Union, now between
America and China. Even here, though,
there are crucial differences. In the 1960s
America was in a race, the outcome of
which could not be known. Today it is the
reigning champion, seeking merely to
maintain its preeminence. But the ques
tion in the minds of the spectators is strik
ingly similar. Does the American system
work better than the alternative when
faced with the challenges of the future?
In the 1960s America started off on the
back foot. The Soviet Union had launched
the first satellite into space in 1957 and the
first human in 1961. If the space race was to
get into orbit, and thereby demonstrate
both your remarkable technological pro
wess and your ability to drop a nuclear
weapon onto any point on the Earth, the
Soviet Union had already won. Part of the
genius of Apollo was to redefine the race as
being one to the Moon.
The fact that getting to the Moon re
quires a very large launcher meant that the
more limited technology which had al
lowed the Soviet Union to take the lead in
Earth orbit no longer counted for much.
Both sides needed a fundamentally new
capability. It was America which, through a
remarkable and extremely costly effort,
successfully built that capability in theThe destination is the same but the race back to the Moon today differs in
important ways from the first