Russia and the US wage a new space battle – this time to capture astro-tourists

The accidental firing of small navigation rockets on Russia’s new spacecraft-science lab - just after it docked with the International Space Station in July 2021 - caused the ISS to start spinning like a top, all while circling the Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. 

Moscow’s space leadership, and the two cosmonauts in orbit, frantically raced to safeguard the station and their partners – the US, French and Japanese astronauts on the ISS. Russia’s aero-wizardry rescued the ISS, yet it is still preparing for a joust over the Station’s future.

The ISS, symbol of the entente forged in the heavens between the space superpowers after their doomsday nuclear war games, is set to host a new era of rivalry: Russian space agency Roscosmos will vie with US counterparts to catapult hyper-rich spacefarers to the celestial abode.

Russia’s taken the lead in this reinvented rocket race, with a $100-million-plus compact to fly two Japanese adventurers to the ISS. Space Adventures, the US outfit brokering the trip, says Russia, which shot the first human ever into orbit, remains a formidable space power.

Yet Roscosmos faces a swiftly rising contender. Since lofting its prototype orbital rocket in 2008, SpaceX has sparked a Big Bang-like explosion of spacecraft advances. SpaceX is now testing its interplanetary Starship, and in 2020 launched more rockets than Russia.

Elon Musk’s ever-morphing rocketworks now seems poised to speed beyond Roscosmos in whizzing space trekkers to the ISS: SpaceX has been commissioned to send 16 explorers, via its futuristic Dragon capsules, to the ISS starting early 2022. 

Axiom Space, SpaceX’s new ally on the ISS jaunts, is so certain of an upcoming tourist boom that it is building two new habitat modules to expand the orbiting outpost. It’s unclear if Roscosmos will follow suit, but it did vow to slash Soyuz ticket prices to compete with SpaceX.

Roscosmos' mercurial director, Dmitry Rogozin, a target of US sanctions, has been jousting via Twitter with Musk and NASA, threatening to secede from the ISS union. Yet their space-tourism tournaments might prove so lucrative they trigger a truce protecting the Station’s future. 

SpaceX’s founder muses that dominating the exploding sphere of orbital odysseys, and even winning the contest to land NASA’s explorers on the Moon in 2024, are all just way stations on his ultimate quest – to co-create a new civilization on Mars. Why?

“Making humanity multiplanetary,” Musk says, means rewriting our supreme destiny and outlook on the cosmos. “You want to think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future.”