Since the first caveman saw a star glinting back at him in the night’s sky, humans have had an interest in space.
That interest evolved into desperation in the 1980s when two huge governments – the US and the USSR – launched state-backed programmes to achieve superior spacecraft capability.
Now over 7,000 rockets have left Earth since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik in 1957. The pace is only quickening, with the Space Race between nations heating up to levels not seen since the Cold War.
In 2026 a rocket has left the ground somewhere on Earth every 29 hours but these days competition isn’t driven by national prestige, rather by commercial economics.
Tudor Williams, chief technical officer at Filtronic, a company which builds systems for commercial space operators like Elon Musk’s Starlink, said: “The Cold War race was about two governments proving a political point, and once that point was made, momentum dropped away.
“What’s happening now is being driven by genuine commercial demand, satellite broadband, reusable rockets, cheaper access to orbit, so it’s more sustainable and it’s opening space up to a much wider range of players, not just two nations. That said, the pace is hard to ignore.”
According to research from Accu, the US is currently dominating proceedings, having launched 195 successful missions in 2025, against China’s 90 and Russia’s 17.
The US spends an estimated $79.7 billion a year across NASA and defence, dwarfing China’s estimated $19.9 billion and Russia’s $3.4 billion.
But Dr Williams argues that the UK is “one of the biggest satellite-building nations in the world, which doesn’t get talked about enough”.
He said: “We’ve now got facilities like the National Satellite Test Facility so satellites can be tested here rather than shipped abroad, and there’s genuine momentum behind UK launch capability too.
“On the supply chain side, we’ve had strong backing from the UK Space Agency for our own work, which reflects a wider push to build sovereign capability across the sector.”