Houston, We Have a Problem

The U.S. space shuttle program will be no more after Friday, when the shuttle Atlantis makes its final launch from Cape Canaveral. While it’s not the death of U.S. space travel, the demise of the expensive shuttle will leave the U.S. reliant, for now, on Russian rockets and hopeful that the private sector will soon be able to pick up the slack. Here’s a look at the countries and companies looking to seize this opportunity to lay a claim to the great beyond.

RUSSIA

Budget: $3.8 billion

Next steps: The country that began the space race with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 appears — at least in terms of manned flight — to have prevailed. Russia nearly abandoned space altogether following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It finally shut down its flagship orbital station, Mir, in 2001. But Russia has reinvested in its space program under the Putin/Medvedev tandem and now accounts for 40 percent of all global space launches.

With the end of the U.S. shuttle program, Russia will have a monopoly on transporting astronauts to the International Space Station, using its ageing Soyuz rockets, until at least 2016. It’s a lucrative business — the United States is paying Russia about $43.4 million per astronaut — but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said that Russia should not content itself to be a mere “ferryman” to the stars. Russia and China will jointly launch an unmanned Mars probe later this year. The Russian space agency’s more ambitious plans include a manned mission to the moon by 2025, potentially followed by an “inhabited station.”

CHINA

Budget: $1.3 billion

Next steps: China is a relative latecomer to the space race and its achievements so far are somewhat modest. It launched its first manned mission in 2003 — becoming the third country to do so — and hasn’t sent a person up since 2008. But, unsurprisingly, its ambitions are enormous. Later this year, China plans to launch the first of three separate temporary space stations which will eventually lead to a permanent orbital station sometime around 2020 or 2022.

China also launched an unmanned moon probe, Chang’e-2, last October. Chang’e 1, launched in 2007, crashed by design on the moon’s surface in 2009. By 2020, it hopes to have an unmanned lunar lander bring back samples and, if all goes well, is hoping to launch a manned mission to the moon by 2022.

Former NASA Chief Administrator Michael Griffin told a Senate panel in 2007 that “China will be able to put people on the moon before we will be able to get back [there].” Barring any unforeseen contingencies, that now seems to be almost a certainty.

In addition to its manned spaceflight ambitions, China raised eyebrows in 2007 with its test of an anti-satellite missile.

INDIA

Budget: $1.3 billion

Next steps: In contrast to other great powers, whose space missions were outgrowths of military programs and aimed at demonstrating national greatness, India’s space program (ISRO) was, until recently, focused almost exclusively on terrestrial concerns. In the mid-1970s, India launched satellites to bring television service to the most remote regions of the country. Other orbital vehicles have been used to spot water in drought-prone regions and connect rural hospitals via satellite hookup.

In 2008, the character of India’s forays into space changed dramatically, with the launch of Chandrayaan-1, the country’s first moon probe. Some Indian politicians questioned why a country with massive rural poverty was spending $79 million on such an extravagance, but the program was justified somewhat in 2009, when Chandrayaan-1 discovered water molecules in the moon’s soil, a major scientific breakthrough. The mission ended more than a year ahead of schedule when ISRO lost radio contact with Chandrayaan-1, but the mission was still considered a scientific success.

In addition to a return to the moon, ISRO is also now planning an unmanned Mars mission by 2015.

EUROPE

Budget: $4.8 billion

Next steps: Comprised of 18 member states and founded in the waning days of the Cold War space race, the European Space Agency (ESA) has traditionally focused on smaller missions with tangible scientific payoff rather than large prestige projects. But ESA has cooperated with NASA on a number of major projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Like NASA, ESA has seen some of its more ambitious projects stymied by funding problems — as well as the unique bureaucratic obstacles that come from running a multilateral space agency. While Germany and France have enthusiastically backed expensive voluntary projects — such as the development of ESA’s very own launch vehicle, the Ariane Rocket, and its involvement in the International Space Station — Britain has tended to be more enthusiastic about ESA’s proposed Mars mission, EXOMars. (However, budget cuts to NASA’s portion of the EXOMars mission have put the project in jeopardy.)

ESA, like the American space program, will be reliant on Russia to send astronauts into space for at least the next few years, but it’s building its own manned reentry vehicle, which could be available for service around 2025.

PRIVATE SECTOR

Budget: $6 billion allocated by NASA to companies for private manned spaceflight development in 2011

Next steps: With the shuttle making its last flight and the cancellation of NASA’s moon program, the U.S. government is putting its hopes for the future of manned space flight in the private sector, allocating billions of dollars in contracts to private companies to develop alternatives to Russia’s Soyuz rocket for taking American astronauts into orbit.

For the public, private spaceflight may conjure images of Richard’s Branson’s sleek Virgin Galactic offering $200,000-a-pop low-orbit jaunts to celebrities and investment bankers, but the undisputed leader in private space flight is California-based SpaceX, founded in 2002 by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. SpaceX has already obtained $3 billion in government contracts, including one to ferry supplies to the International Space Station using its experimental Dragon spacecraft, beginning early next year. SpaceX is also working on a system to ferry astronauts into space that it hopes will cost around $20 million per seat — a fraction of most estimates for future space travel.

OUTLIERS

A number of other countries have also launched recent forays into the final frontier. In the last five years, Japan has launched one of the most ambitious lunar missions since the U.S. moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s and may be a dark horse in the new moon race. South Korea recently completed its first space launch center, about 300 miles from Seoul.

Not to be outdone by its BRIC partners, Brazil has an ambitious slate of satellite launches planned for the next three years, some in cooperation with China. Brazilian satellites have helped provide important information on the rate of deforestation in the Amazon.

Iran is planning to launch a monkey into space onboard an Iranian-designed craft using an Iranian rocket this summer, a step up from last year’s mission carried out by a rat, two turtles, and worms.