**2. The increasing level of the investments in space**

As a testimony of the recent dynamics of space investments, in 2019 budgets (**Figure 2**), the USA and its now very successful public-private partnerships, are leading the investment into the new space race. For a comparison, in 2019, the French government investment in space was *in par* with Elon Musk private investment.

Fast-foward to 2022, the budgetary update of ESA as reported in the press conference of 13th April 2002, after the 307th ESA HQ meeting, is aiming at negotiating the 2022 Paris agreement with Member States upward of the 14B Euros (15.3B USD), which was the amount of the running Seville Agreement budget. Likewise, the French Government has earmarked 2.6B Euros (2.8B USD; [5]) for 2022 space

**Figure 2.** *2019 billion USD investment in the space industry [4].* *Access to Space, Access to the Moon – Two Sides of the Same Coin? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105175*

activities, partially including the very active '*New Space*' sub-sector, which also benefits from additional parallel incubator-type budgets. In the meantime, the NASA FY2022 Request (NASA [6]) is steadily increasing from 22.6B USD in 2020 to 24.8B USD in 2022.

Also worth to mention is that this does not account to the cost of labour and the cost of processed material, in that manner, the PRC's capital/labour efficiency might have some advantage in the medium-term perspectives. Also to observe, the longlasting experience and multiple collaboration system that Russia and Europe shared in terms of space launching expertise. This was abandoned by the 307th ESA meeting, held on the 13th April 2022, as the direct consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the same line and on the same day, the PRC announced that space collaboration with Russia was put on hold (NASA [7]). ESA is now redirecting collaboration efforts primarily with NASA, alongside some other space agencies. In any case, it is not anymore a question of who will get to space; it is more of a question of when and how the upcoming stations and settlements will be kick-started and inhabited.
