How the U.S. and the Soviet Union Made Unsuccessful Attempts to Collaborate During the Space Race

Could the moon landing have been an international program?

The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union stepped up a gear on May 25, 1961, when American President John F. Kennedy announced that his country would land an astronaut on the Moon by the end of the decade. It was an ambition that might have appeared lofty to many observers, but it was in fact rooted in very Earthly concerns. The rampant success of the Soviet space program up to this point, and in particular the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, coupled with the bungled U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, served as significant political embarrassments, and made the Communist system look stronger on the world stage.

Soon after the Gagarin flight, Kennedy discussed the possibility of a lunar landing program with his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson. He then followed their discussion with a memorandum on April 20, 1961, which asked: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by…a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”

Kennedy unveiled his commitment to what became Project Apollo in a speech to Congress on “Urgent National Needs,” in which he outlined the extraordinary challenges facing the United States, and the extraordinary response that those challenges would imminently require. Announcing the Moon landing commitment, he said: “We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

Kennedy’s speech, and the goal it outlined, captured the public imagination and received immediate political support. At the time, no one seemed concerned about the difficulty or the expense of this undertaking. Congressional debate was perfunctory, and NASA found itself struggling to spend the funds committed to it during the early 1960s. Project Apollo gave the Americans the chance to set their own space exploration agenda. Now with a clear goal, they were no longer stuck playing catch-up with the Soviets. Nevertheless, in 1961, a lunar landing was far beyond the capabilities of either the United States or the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev, chief architect of the Soviet space program, was quick to use the American commitment to obtain further resources for his own space exploration program, but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stopped short of approving a Soviet Moon mission. Korolev tried to structure his nation’s space efforts so that they could be extended into a lunar landing program later, and lobbied heavily on the mission’s behalf, finally securing backing in 1963. By this time it was clear that a race to the Moon was underway, whether the Soviet leadership cared to acknowledge that fact or not.

The public commitment of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to send Americans to the Moon was an overt challenge to the Soviet Union to demonstrate technological supremacy in space exploration. The winner would undoubtedly gain massive prestige around the world, perhaps swaying the allegiance of various unaligned nations within the wider Cold War. For the Americans, still smarting from the seemingly unlimited success of the Soviet space program, the competition was intended as a real challenge, prompting their government to further open up its treasury to help NASA achieve the goal of setting foot on another body in the Solar System. After some initial hesitancy, the Soviets took the bait, apparently accepting the terms of the American challenge to a race to the Moon.

But what if the United States and the Soviet Union had undertaken the Moon landing program cooperatively, rather than as a competition? Perhaps surprisingly, this is more than an academic question. There were genuine efforts to make the Moon mission a joint program. In his inaugural address in January 1961, Kennedy spoke directly to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and asked him to cooperate in exploring “the stars.” In his State of the Union address ten days later, Kennedy asked the Soviet Union to join the United States “in developing a weather prediction program, in a new communications satellite program, and in preparation for probing the distant planets of Mars and Venus, probes which may someday unlock the deepest secrets of the Universe.”

After Yuri Gagarin’s first orbital flight and the failed American-backed invasion of Cuba in the early months of 1961, Kennedy asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925–68), to assess the Soviet leadership’s inclinations toward taking a cooperative approach to human space exploration. On the very same day that he gave his Apollo speech, President Kennedy instructed some of his key advisors to “offer the Soviets a range of choices as to the degree and scope of cooperation.” Within two weeks of giving his bold May 25 speech to the Joint Session of Congress, Kennedy met Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna, Austria, and there proposed making Apollo a joint mission between their two nations. The Soviet leader reportedly first said no, then replied “Why not?” before then apparently changing his mind again, saying that disarmament was a prerequisite for cooperation in space. Then, on September 20, 1963, Kennedy made his famous speech before the United Nations, in which he again proposed a mutual human mission to the Moon. He closed by urging, “Let us do the big things together.” But his call for collaboration went unheeded.

In public, the Soviet Union was noncommittal. The official government newspaper Pravda, for example, dismissed its nation’s own 1963 proposal for a Moon mission as premature. Some historians have suggested that Khrushchev viewed the American offer as a ploy to open up Soviet society and compromise Soviet technology. Behind the scenes, Khrushchev asked his son, Sergei, an engineer at the Experimental Design Bureau OKB-1 set up by Sergei Korolev, to come to the Kremlin and discuss this proposal. The two men agreed that such a collaborative project would enable the Soviet Union to reduce significantly the cost of space exploration, and such an agreement would ensure that Soviet prestige would remain intact. It would, in essence, take the Moon out of the Cold War rivalry. But no cooperative venture materialized. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and Khrushchev was deposed in the following year. But had both leaders remained in place or simply committed their nations to a single joint Moon mission, one of the most significant achievements in space exploration to date might have been very different.

The photo above features astronaut Vance Brand and cosmonaut Valeri Kubasov during the first joint mission between the United States and Russia. But could such collaboration have succeeded a decade earlier?
 

Read more in The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration © 2018 Quarto Publishing Plc

Roger D. Launius | Read More

ROGER D. LAUNIUS served as chief historian of NASA between 1990 and 2002 and is a recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Exceptional Achievement Medal. From NASA, he moved to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, where he served most recently as Associate Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs. He has written or edited more than 30 books on aerospace history, including The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration, Apollo's Legacy, and NASA Space Shuttle: 40th Anniversary.