Mark Whittington (and former Congressman Walker) will disagree, but Jeff Foust has a good piece at the Space Policy Review that explains why it won't happen, and more importantly, why that's A Good Thing. I think he's got it pretty close to right.

A desire for a race with a China that's simply recapitulating Russian hardware is nostalgia for the sixties and Apollo, and that's a mindset that we have to break ourselves out of, instead focusing on commerce and lower cost of access. If we ever actually develop an American, free-enterprise space industry, we'll leave all of the command economies (including NASA) in the dust.

On a related note, Laughing Wolf has a good post on why many space entrepreneurs fail, and why we seem to have made so little commercial progress to date. It's a lot more fun to draw pictures of rockets than it is to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out markets and drawing up realistic business plans that a non-insane investor will fund. This was a perennial kvetch of the late G. Harry Stine (who used to harangue the attendees of the Space Access Conference on this subject every year).

Fortunately, I think that's changing. I've tried to pick up the lecture where he lamentably left off, and I think that it's finally sinking in, because we did see some serious companies with serious proposals, starting to raise serious money this year.

I'm very optimistic about this industry right now. We're not going to get to orbit overnight, but some interesting things are going to happen in the next couple years that I think will have dramatic effects on both the quality of business plans, and the receptiveness of investors toward them. And it will ultimately get us into orbit much faster than any number of NASA programs (from which the prospects of the latter are, in my opinion, null).

Rand,

The first two links point back to your own URL.

Feel free to delete this post once they're fixed. :)

Cold war "i was here first" space race wasnt a Good Thing in long term.
But a different kind of space race might be on. The race to make space development efforts economic and self-sustainable.
Japan is taking long strides in producing the next-gen space launch systems, which might even work out and be affordable, given that japanese know very well how to bring high-tech to consumer at affordable price and general japanese fixation on high-tech gadgets. See RVT and Hope-X projects, they might succeed where corresponding NASA efforts have failed ( DC-X and X-33 ). Japanese are seriously and quietly working on space solar power too.
Theres X-prize. Which country will win it, and where can the launches take place ? Will X-Prize Cup be eventually held in Australia, because of friendly space laws ?
Will all Trailblazer craft ( and future commercial moonbound probes ) be launched on Russian boosters due to lack of competitive offers in US ?
If chinese indeed are serious about space, they obviously have studied history and they probably understand some of the failures in the past. Maybe they arent just doing it for pride. Maybe they see the potential for economic growth.

Actually, curmudgeons said exactly what i meant in the previous comment.
It _could be_ a different kind of race, not the flags and footprints race.
And there are possibly more runners than US and China.
Japan, India have been hammering away at their space tech's diligently and quietly. And they havent commited their entire space programs to white elephants ( yet, anyway )
Plus, private efforts might turn to anyone who provides most economic launch services, which currently apprar to come entirely from Russia.

With regard to Laughing Wolf's comments on the need for a viable and multi-faceted business plan for space ventures, check out LiftPort www.liftport.com - they seem to be thinking along the same lines by establishing profit centers that are independently viable.

Launching a rocket is not as easy as it sounds. There is debate as to whether anyone at NASA could stand the Saturn V up and launch it today. The industry has lost many of its innovators to retirement or death.

The Soviets used forced labor, pulled all the best scientific minds from the country, and still had an unbelievable amount of rockets fall right back on them. It?s hard to see how a private company is going to pull this off by themselves. The resources of a government are essential to launching a rocket correctly and reliably.

It just seems that the aerospace industry is stuck in a terrible rut. The idea that we should only use existing technology to try to break into orbit is absurd. Filling a building up with fuel and launching it into space (while it sits on the pad for ten seconds overcoming its own weight) is the 101 answer to the problem. It?s time we started to try to find the trick to gaining escape velocity. Learn what gravity really is, instead of being stuck with following the effects of it.

Doctors have the same problem as the aerospace industry. He doesn?t know what?s really happing, but he?s seen effects, so he treats to those because he doesn?t understand the problem.