The Two Modern Space Races (arstechnica.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Observers of the current state of the space program like to maintain that a space race, such as occurred in the 1960s, will never happen again. They cannot be farther from the truth, since not just one, but two space races are going on. The Google Lunar X Prize is managing a race for the first private group to land a rover on the lunar surface and perform a number of tasks for glory and prize money. Eric Berger at Ars Technica pointed out that another prize space race, with the goal of performing the first private crewed space mission in low Earth orbit, is ongoing thanks to NASA's commercial crew program.

Comments

This round of 'space race' happens because ..

[Anonymous Coward]

... Observers of the current state of the space program like to maintain that a space race, such as occurred in the 1960s, will never happen again. They cannot be farther from the truth, since not just one, but two space races are ...

Anything to do with space cost money, A LOT OF MONEY, and space race were relegate to the national domain because only governments can go on printing money without fearing a lot of negative consequences

Corporations of todays are as large - if not larger than - governments, and because of that, we have the modern day space races

But they are not the same type of space race we used to have back in the '60s and '70s, because, unlike national programs, space races nowadays are programs looking to make some handsome returns --- ROI has become the defecto engine behind the current space races