Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 18The Twenty-First-Century Space Race

On a balmy afternoon in Cape Canaveral, a day not unlike many others, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off into U.S. aerospace history. It is May 30, 2020, and the rocket is speeding NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up into earth orbit for a docking with the International Space Station (ISS).

Incredibly, this marked the first manned launch from U.S. soil in almost a decade since NASA shut down the Space Shuttle programme. For nine long years, NASA had to rely on the Russians to provide transportation for U.S. astronauts going to and from the ISS.

How did it come to this after the glories of NASA’s Apollo era? Half a century after the Apollo missions successfully landed 12 American astronauts on the moon, between 1969 and 1972, the U.S. could not put its own people into space without help from Russia.

The truth was that NASA had been facing excessively high costs for a Space Shuttle programme that was running on 30-year-old technology in a bureaucratic environment that could not keep up with an evolving space industry.

In 2011, U.S. space officials signed an agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, that allowed NASA to purchase seats on the Soyuz spacecraft. NASA paid an average of US$56 million per seat on each flight. Between 2011 and that historic day when SpaceX launched its first crewed mission to the ISS, American astronauts had flown on the Soyuz spacecraft at least 20 times.

To fix this problem, the same ...