9exclusive club that it had been in the
1960s: Japan, China and Europe were
now all increasingly assertive presences
on what the United States saw as its own
frontier of the future. In a 1987 report to
Nasa’s Administrator, Dr Sally K Ride- America’s first female astronaut –
argued that, as a result of the Challenger
disaster, “The United States’ role as the
leader of spacefaring nations came into
serious question”.
The mirage of the Soviet space
challenge dissolved with the collapse of
the USSR in 1991 but the US has
struggled to find a compelling new goal
to capture the public’s imagination.
Ambitious Mars-oriented space
programmes proposed by Presidents
George HW Bush and George W Bush
fizzled out amid congressional hostility
and the Obama administration’s
indifference, respectively. Donald
Trump, who criticised Nasa’s current
plans, is merely the latest president to
propose a bold trip to Mars with no
feasible way of paying for it.
Far from basking in the glory of
its lunar triumph, the United States
has spent the past 50 years glancing
nervously over its shoulder, worrying
that its hard-won leadership in space
will be squandered without a similarly
impressive follow-up. Just as America
has struggled with the burdens of its
self-appointed role as world police, being
the foremost space power has proven to
be a demanding task. Blue Origin and
its commercial competitors – SpaceX
and Virgin Galactic – should take note:
winning the lead in space exploration
is one thing, but maintaining that
leadership in the face of determined
challengers is quite another.Thomas Ellis teaches
in the department of
international history
at LSEILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELLcency in recent years has given the
Russians a decided advantage in the
space race.”
Though the first full launch of the
Space Shuttle Columbia on 12 April
1981 briefly allayed these fears, it was
not long before those concerns returned.
The Challenger disaster of 28 January
1986 – in which that orbiter broke up
shortly after launch, resulting in the
deaths of five astronauts plus two
non-Nasa crew, including school
teacher Christa McAuliffe – appeared
to validate criticisms of the Shuttle
as an expensive and unreliable creature
of compromise. With astronauts
grounded once again, concerns about
space leadership returned.
The Soviets’ Mir space station
appeared to signal the arrival of the
long-heralded Kosmograd. As Mikhail
Gorbachev’s reforms took hold, it
seemed that the USSR might soon
out-cooperate as well as out-compete the
United States. To make matters worse,
space exploration was no longer theИЗП
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