Are Russian Space Rocket Plans to Mars Driving a New Space Race?

Currently, the Curiosity rover is cruising around Mars collecting and beaming volumes of data back to Earth.
When the Mars Science Laboratory successfully landed on the Red Planet, it was one of the most celebrated space exploration events since the Apollo Moon Landing.

Even though this is an impressive achievement for science, the beginning of the project came at a very curious time.

NASA has had its eye on Mars for some time; however, it came at a somewhat questionable time in NASA’s history. It appears that NASA made a hard push for the Red Planet attempting to beat out the Russians to the punch. Does all of this point to a reignited space race with the finish line located on Mars?

The Americans nearly lost the race in 2011 when the Russians successfully launched the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. Even though the orbiter was heading for Phobos, an asteroid-like moon of Mars, and not the planet itself, the project would have tightened Russia’s grip on space exploration.

The project began in 1996 when no other country was really working toward Mars, but it took more than a decade to take the project from paper to practice. (1)

The project went into active development in 2008. It seems the project was fast-tracked because by 2011, the Russians were ready for launch. The orbiter was launched on November 9, 2011, however, it never made it out of Earth’s orbit. The spacecraft’s rockets that were intended to push it towards Mars failed. Barely even two month later, the orbiter crashed back to Earth. (2)

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