The Washington Post reports this morning (Marc Kaufman, 7/9/08) in a front page article that the U.S. has a plethora of competitors in space and that it’s losing global “dominance” in this arena. Joseph Fuller, Jr., president of Futron Corporation, concludes that, “Systemic and competitive forces threaten U.S. space leadership.”

Many countries have access to space themselves, choose their own astronauts, run their own robotic planetary programs, and some even have plans for bases on the Moon — the new status symbol of growing space powers.

According to the Post, this growing global competence in space is exacerbated by the 2003 Columbia disaster and the widespread perception that NASA is underfunded relative to its goals. Plus the real killer is the 5-year Shuttle gap when the U.S. won’t be able to launch its own astronauts to the space station; however, polls show that the potential seriousness of this has not yet reached the American people, although Buzz Aldrin has publicly drawn attention to it recently.

As an American space enthusiast, it gives me no pleasure to report such information, but frankly, it’s following closely the pattern of Great Explorations and MEPs over the last 200 years, and is especially reminiscent of the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window.

One very possible forecast that has appeared on this site is an international replay of the 1957 Sputnik shock, because America’s complacency and errors are making the U.S. vulnerable to growing space programs around the world. Based on the timing of the 1950s, the next international race to space might be triggered near 2013, but the way things are evolving, it might come even sooner.

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