Trend Lines

The first space race, between the United States and the Soviet Union, was a geopolitical and ideological struggle between superpowers. Now five decades in the past, it pushed the limits of technology to extremes and realized some long-held dreams of humanity, like putting a human on the moon. But after the enormous gains of the 1950s and 60s, space exploration advanced more gradually. More countries developed space programs, but between 1961 and 2000, only the Soviet Union, the United States and China put humans into space. After the U.S.’s Apollo program came to an end, humans never returned to the moon, and ambitious plans to expand human exploration to other planets were shelved. And with the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the U.S. seemed to become disinterested in the final frontier, even contracting human launches out to Russia. Over the past decade, something changed. In 2004, U.S. Congress required NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration to legalize private spaceflight. Then, in 2015, it pas