JOINT FLIGHT TO THE MOON PROPOSED BY KENNEDY, AGREED BY KHRUSHCHEV

The Soyuz complex remained the Soviet moon plan until August 1964 and, as can be seen, was limited to a manned circumlunar mission. A man-on-the-moon programme was not even on the drawing board. A central assumption in NASA, in the American political community and in the Western media was that the Soviet Union had a long­time plan to send a man to the moon. All Soviet missions were explained in the context of this presumed, methodical master plan. To the West, it was unthinkable that the Soviet Union was not trying to plant the red flag on the moon first.

In reality, until August 1964, the Soviet Union had no such plan at all. The significance of the Kennedy challenge of 25th May 1961 had not been fully appre­ciated by the Kremlin. Kennedy’s speech may have been considered aspirational or rhetorical, rather than the purposeful mobilization of an entire national effort that it became. For the Soviet Union, well used to public hyperbole, it was just another

speech. According to his son, Sergei, Nikita Khrushchev ‘did not attach much importance to the challenge of John F. Kennedy’. But as time went on and the American space industry burgeoned, he was now faced with the choice of accepting the challenge and spending billions, or allowing his richer competitor to get ahead. ‘My father was not prepared to answer the question and neither was Korolev’, his son said later. Khrushchev had a sense of financial proportion lacking in his successor, wanted to concentrate the Soviet Union’s limited resources on housing and agricul­ture and was savvy enough to know that for the Americans the Apollo programme was almost small change. Sergei Khrushchev said: ‘It had never been my father’s plan to spend substantial sums in order to support our priority in space’.

It is also worth recording that, although the American moon project appeared, in retrospect, to be purposeful and deliberative, this was not always how it seemed at the time. President Kennedy had accepted the project somewhat reluctantly, had cast around for alternatives, but had been hustled into the venture by his vice-president and space enthusiast Lyndon Johnson. Following his speech to Congress in May 1961, only five congressmen had spoken and the project had been nodded through. There was little sign of public enthusiasm. Congress had approved many projects before and they had not materialized: the moon programme could well have gone their way too. Kennedy himself seems to have been uncertain and when he met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna later that June, Kennedy proposed a joint lunar venture. According to Sergei Khrushchev, this proposal ‘found my father unprepared’. Nikita Khrushchev did not formally respond. His own military were unhappy about sharing their rocket secrets (so was Korolev) and Khrushchev was concerned that the Americans would find out how weak their missile forces really were. Khrushchev baulked at Korolev’s estimates for the cost. The Russians were probably wary of exposing just how unprepared they were for such a venture.

The situation changed two years later. Kennedy repeated his proposal, this time to Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in August and then to the United Nations in September. Many query his motives. Some say that Kennedy made the offer with the certainty that the Soviet Union would refuse, but make him look statesmanlike to the world. Privately, some people on the American side were apprehensive about sharing with the Russians, as they were in turn.

Whatever these convoluted manoeuvrings, Khrushchev was more positive this time. The Soviet Union now had its own fleet of R-16 missiles and was closer to strategic military parity. With the Cuban misadventure left behind, he felt he could now work with Kennedy. The prospect of avoiding an expensive moon race and actually sharing costs began to look attractive. In a compromise with the military, a joint moon programme would be done on the basis of each partner doing its share independently, minimizing the risk of Russia learning of American technical capa­cities. In the autumn of 1963, Nikita Khrushchev volunteered that the Soviet Union was not in a moon race and had no plans to send men to the moon. On 26th October, he declared:

The Soviet Union is not at present planning flights of cosmonauts to the moon. Soviet scientists are studying it as a scientific problem.

The Americans want to land a man on the moon by 1970. We wish them luck and we will watch to see how they fly there and how they will return. I wish them success. Competition would not bring any good but might to the contrary cause harm because it might lead to the death of people.

He opened the door to the enterprise being undertaken together. Now that Russia had launched a woman into space, he jokingly referred to how an American man could fly to the moon with a Soviet woman, but then countered by saying the gender balance should be reversed and a Russian man should bring an American woman there. This was the second round of what could have turned into a courtship for a joint pro­gramme. There was a positive response from the White House which said it was studying the premier’s statement. Although Khrushchev had now responded to the Vienna offer two years late, he had now responded positively. We know of no technical documents that could have outlined how such a joint venture might have taken place. The proposal came to an abrupt end only three weeks later when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, where he arrived directly after visiting the growing space facilities of Houston, Texas. The new leader, Lyndon Johnson, had built his political reputation on responding to the Soviet threat in space and made it clear that he was not interested in a joint programme.

Thus by early 1964, the Soviet Union:

• Had its own plan to fly to the moon, the Soyuz complex, now in construction.

• Based its approach on Earth orbit rendezvous.

• Planned only a flight around the moon, without orbiting or landing.

• Had paid little or no attention to Kennedy’s speech of 25th May 1961.

• Was reluctant, principally for reasons of cost, to compete with the United States.

• Had begun, slowly, to respond to overtures for a joint lunar venture with the Americans.

• But now found the Kennedy idea rejected by the new American president.