India’s boom, Russia’s crunch: how money is shaping a new space race
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The space race India aims to win this week by landing first on the moon's south pole is about science, the politics of national prestige and a new frontier: money.India's Chandrayaan-3 is heading for a landing on the lunar south pole on Wednesday. If it succeeds, analysts and executives expect an immediate boost for the South Asian nation's nascent space industry. Russia's Luna-25, which launched less than two weeks ago, had been on track to get there first – before the lander crashed from orbit, possibly taking with it the funding for a successor mission, analysts say. The seemingly sudden competition to get to a previously unexplored region of the moon recalls the space race of the 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed.But now space is a business, and the ...