Image: The turquoise waters southeast of the Kuwaiti island of Failaka are captured in this image acquired by the Φsat-2 mission.
The frontrunner in this new space race is, of course, NASA. They’re the only organization to have even done it before in the first place, but that was 50 years ago. And while all the technology of the Apollo program still exists in the form of blueprints and designs, all the human expertise that went into crafting those rockets and spaceships is now either retired or passed away. Besides, we’re not spending nearly as much money on the modern space program than we were in the 1950’s and 60’s, and to be quite frank, the Apollo missions were outright dangerous – they had a level of risk that is completely unacceptable to modern standards. When the Apollo 1 disaster happened, killing three astronauts during a launch dress rehearsal in 1967, NASA paused human spaceflight…for less than two years. An event like that today would likely shut down programs for at least a decade.
