Do national space agencies share information with each other?
Do space agencies collaborate or go it alone?
Today, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency work together towards common space goals
Asked by Carole Davies
The Space Race saw the Soviet Union and the US locked in competition with each other. During this time, each nation’s developments were extremely secretive. This was only a factor for around 20 years – after the successful Moon landings of 1969, the approach to space exploration changed.
The final Apollo flight saw the USSR and the US work together on a mission to dock an American capsule with a Russian spacecraft. This signified the start of international collaboration within the space industry. Nowadays almost all information is shared. This is for a number of reasons, the main one being cost. It is very expensive to send experiments to do the same thing, it is much more cost efficient to send one and share the results. This also means that expertise can be pulled in from across the globe to design missions and analyse test results.
Answered by Josh Barker from the National Space Centre
Got a question for us? Send it into [email protected] and you could see it featured in All About Space – available every month for just £3.99. Alternatively you can subscribe here for a fraction of the price!