GThe Americans have always refused any kind of collaboration with China in space, even rejecting the request to enter the International Space Station (ISS). The result is that today the Chinese have gone their own way, they have set up an ambitious program that focuses on the Moon and goes as far as Mars, but which also passes through their space station. Instead, the ISS, the result of international collaboration between the United States, Europe and Russia, risks falling under the blows of the crisis in Ukraine.
Last week Samantha Cristoforetti returned on board the station confronting what remains of that cooperation: the display of the “Victory Banner”, the Soviet flag displayed on what remained of the Berlin Reichstag in 1945, was something more than a jolly. The action of the Russian astronauts was in fact accompanied by the announcement of the forthcoming interruption of cooperation.
That coexistence in space that had resisted in recent decades risks ending up in the face of the invasion of Ukraine and the isolation sanctioned by the international community against Moscow. For Russia, the risk is to lose an outpost in space which it will no longer have access to for years. But for the whole world it is a sudden brake on the research and development programs that were developing. Indeed, a step back.
As the Chinese story also demonstrates, in space, as well as on Earth, collaborative competition is far more effective for everyone than the antagonistic competition. But today that climate built over decades has to come to terms with politics again. The debate that will take place at the Trento Festival on the geopolitics of space, where the “new space economy” will also be discussed, is therefore extremely topical, in an appointment moderated by the deputy director of Sole 24 Ore Roberto Bernabò.
The new space economy (to which the Sole 24 Ore has decided to dedicate at least one monthly page, edited by Alessia Maccaferri and Pierangelo Soldavini) was born in those low orbits that today are the extension of the Earth. And as such they must be treated in terms of opportunities, also for the economy and finance. The reduction of costs with technological evolution and the provision of efficient infrastructures has allowed access to private individuals: already today there is talk of selling or renting part of the ISS to private individuals, while private astronauts have already been put into orbit with the prospect of building a completely independent station. Without taking into account that the carriers for the satellites are no longer space agencies, which rely on private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.