Musk, China race to Mars

The race to Mars is heating up. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Sunday he plans to launch five uncrewed missions to Mars in the next two years, days after China moved up the timeline of its own mission by two years, which could see it bringing samples from the red planet back to Earth as early as 2031, Space.com reported.

With NASA’s Mars sample-return mission in limbo because of ballooning costs, “Beijing seems to have decided this is a race that it can win,” one expert told The Straits Times. China’s commercial space sector still lags behind that of the US, but thanks to Beijing’s massive support, SpaceX might one day face “a pack of wolves” in the form of Chinese rivals, an analyst told AFP.