[5] On 25 July 2019, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing in 1969, Public Service Broadcasting performed a specially commissioned new orchestral arrangement of the album at the Royal Albert Hall in London, as part of the summer's Proms programme.

Most reviews praised the band's choice of theme and commented heavily on the album's use of tone and instrumentation to depict certain events in the space race.

[9] Kevin Harley, writing in The Independent, wrote that the band proved themselves with the album; "there’s fuel enough for manoeuvre in pop that’s piloted with intelligence, energy, craft and atmospheric control, even if it seems frightfully, stiflingly high-concept."

He also further praised the album's mood tonal shifts, and concluded the review by stating, "[The Race for Space] is richly entertaining, immersive and evocative, orchestrated with fastidious care and feeling.

[19] To encompass such a momentous period in human history into one record – and a short one at that – may have seemed like an act of high folly but, like their forebears, Public Service Broadcasting have chosen this path not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

The results are stellar.In his review of the album for Drowned in Sound, Marc Burrows wrote that "the joy [in The Race for Space] is in how the duo marry theme and function", citing specifically the album's instrumentals and their fit to the archival recordings used, such as "the beeping signal of the pioneering "Russian moon" built into the loping, housy rhythm of 'Sputnik'", and "'E.V.A''s portrayal of Alexei Leonov’s first spacewalk through quietly disorientating switches in timing and mood, breaking from excitement and speed to a gentle drifting.

He wrote that The Race for Space was "a rich and thoroughly enjoyable nine-track journey", and that the band "reinvented the concept album as a delightful, historically engaged rave-up.