The new space race

When the Orion capsule docked off the coast of San Diego, after travelling almost 700,000 miles and travelling at 33 times the speed of sound, the focus was mainly on the technological feat. But that mission tells something deeper: space is no longer the stage for grand national narratives. It has become something else, a concrete extension of terrestrial infrastructures: something on which we already depend, even if almost nobody realises it.
Satellites, navigation systems, telecommunications, climate observation, monitoring of energy networks, supply of critical materials: a large part of the activities that sustain contemporary economic life already passes through space. And international competition is increasingly shifting there, between lunar programmes, new industrial alliances, the race for resources and strategic investments.
It is from this awareness that the new issue of World Energy, the Eni magazine dedicated to the major themes of energy and global geopolitics, begins. The new space race, this is the title of the issue, does not look at space as a remote future or a science fiction narrative, but as a dimension that is already central to the economic and geopolitical balances of the present. A terrain where technology, security, energy transition and competition between states and large corporations are intertwined. Less spectacle, more systems.
Moisés Naím - columnist, former editor of Foreign Policy, one of the most widely read political analysts in the world - makes a significant distinction: in the old space race, he writes, 'rockets were arguments', and the goal was to plant a flag where there was none before, to demonstrate the superiority of a system. Today, the centre of gravity has shifted. "Space is becoming a basic infrastructure: less show, more systems. And when something becomes infrastructure, everyone depends on it; few realise it, but when it jams, the impact is sudden and inevitably political."
Satellites already synchronise electricity grids, guide oil tankers and LNG ships, monitor the integrity of oil and gas pipelines, track greenhouse gas emissions with a precision that no terrestrial system could guarantee. The European Copernicus programme has become an essential tool for enforcing environmental policies, monitoring deforestation, verifying climate commitments. Space, in short, is already inside the energy transition, as a real operational infrastructure.

The geopolitical game
But the issue of World Energy does not stop at the present. It also looks at what is coming.
Alessandro Aresu - one of the sharpest Italian analysts of technological competition between great powers - reconstructs the duopoly that is forming around the Moon. On the one hand, the United States, with the Artemis programme and a model that integrates public funding with the dynamism of the private sector: SpaceX and Blue Origin are not mere suppliers, they are partners who finance innovation and have lowered launch costs. On the other hand, China, with a state-led strategy, included in the five-year plans, oriented towards technological self-sufficiency and the construction of resilient supply chains, and with the declared ambition of becoming the leading space power by 2045.
The south pole of the Moon is at the centre of this competition, for the presence of ice in the craters that are perennially in shadow: water that is essential to support permanent bases and can be transformed into fuel for deep space missions. And for helium-3: a very rare isotope on Earth, abundant in lunar regolith, and considered the ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.

The knot of governance
Simonetta Di Pippo, former director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, tackles one of the most sensitive issues in the magazine: the regulatory void. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies, but leaves open the question of resource exploitation. The US has chosen to recognise the right of private entities to appropriate extracted resources by introducing the concept of security zones around operations. China, on the other hand, proposes an alternative model: the Moon as common heritage of mankind, with governance entrusted to the United Nations.
Two apparently incompatible visions. And, in between, an energy sector that will have to deal with these tensions when space resources cease to be hypothetical and become the subject of contracts, investments, disputes.
Fabio Tronchetti, a jurist specialising in international space law, analyses this crisis of multilateralism: the risk, he writes, is that unilateral initiatives will progressively erode the peaceful nature of the space sector, with consequences that affect not only orbit, but supply chains, infrastructure security and the stability of terrestrial energy markets.

The approaching future
There is also a frontier that until a few years ago seemed to belong to science fiction and that this issue of World Energy describes as a reality under construction: space solar power. The idea is to capture energy from the Sun in orbit - where radiation is constant and 30% more intense than on the Earth's surface - and transmit it to Earth via microwave or laser. There are already successful experiments, and European and Chinese projects are at an advanced stage of study, but conditions are needed to make it competitive in the coming decades.
The same applies to other technologies that until recently seemed distant: orbital data centres designed to support the growing energy demand of artificial intelligence, increasingly central satellite systems for managing networks and critical infrastructures, and even the hypothesis of extracting strategic minerals from asteroids and the Moon to feed the energy transition chains.With this issue dedicated to the new space race, World Energy attempts to read this transformation in all its complexity: technological, energetic, economic and geopolitical. Through international contributions and different points of view, the magazine explores a question that is destined to become increasingly central in the years to come: how will the control of space infrastructures influence the energy and strategic balances of the future?
To delve into the new energy trajectories, discover the new issue of WE - World Energy "Reaching for the Sky".