The eagle and the rabbit America, China and the race to the Moon

O N JULY 11th, climbing through the darkling sky like a bolt of lightning in reverse, Richard Branson stole a whisper of Jeff Bezos’s thunder.

In early June Mr Bezos had garnered headlines and pageviews by announcing that when his rocket company, Blue Origin, launched a space capsule with humans on board for the first time on July 20th he would be among those passengers. Virgin Galactic, a company founded by Sir Richard, had already flown its rocket-plane Unity to the edge of space. Plans were quickly hatched to bring its next test flight forward and to put Sir Richard himself on the crew manifest (he had been planning to take a later flight). On July 11th Unity did its thing, and Sir Richard, returned to Earth, proclaimed a new space age open. Blue Origin tweeted, snarkily if accurately, that its capsule goes higher and has bigger windows.

If Mr Bezos has lost his precedence, he has kept his date. And that matters. July 20th is the anniversary of the first landing of a crewed spacecraft on the Moon: that of the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, in 1969. As such it was, for a long time, a date for retrospection. But now it is also a date for looking forward.

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