Sustaining Soviet-American. Collaboration, 1957-1989

Beginnings

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in space is quite accurately portrayed as one of fierce competition. The launch of the Sputniks in late 1957 and Gagarin’s flight in 1961 were deep blows to American pride. They challenged preconceptions about the superiority of American sci­ence and technology, even about the superiority of the capitalist system itself. Thus, the global struggle for “the soul of mankind” inscribed itself upon a mul­titude of scientific instruments, launch systems, institutions, and individuals.1 For many years, historians have labored to reconcile the paradoxes of Soviet- American cooperation in space with the space and missile races of the mid-twen­tieth century.

Such histories commonly open with speculation centered on the likelihood of a joint lunar mission proposed by President Kennedy to Premier Khrushchev.2 Indeed, Kennedy’s famed May 1961 “Moon Speech,” announcing the United States’ “race to the moon” was bookended by both covert and public invitations to collaborate.3 In so doing, Kennedy unwittingly set up audacious expecta­tions for astronauts and cosmonauts to explore the moon and beyond. With human spaceflight as the agency’s signature activity, scholars have struggled to assign some sort of reason to the two nations’ rocky progression from (what was apparently) an utter lack of intercourse to the stilted Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and finally the interdependence of the International Space Station.4 Geopolitics became reified in human spaceflight: cold shoulders through the dire years of missile and space races; detente’s climactic 1975 handshake in space; and finally, the Cold War denouement in the International Space Station agreements.

Beginning with the Kennedy-Khrushchev moon flirtations, historians have characterized US offers for cooperation as meeting a “rhetorical goal” and functioning as a “benign hypocrisy.” Operating as such, the US space program appeared open to Soviet contributions, but at the same time participated in implicit competition to outdo their rival in hardware and soft power perfor­mances. Such narratives explain the complex motives and political economy of major commitments such as a joint lunar expedition, the ASTP, or the ISS.

Well-publicized, expensive, and demanding years of lead-time, these projects were carefully orchestrated under the watchful eyes of presidential administra­tions and Congress (whose interests at times conflicted with one another and/ or NASA administration).

On the flip side of the coin, the many years spanning Kennedy’s joint lunar base offer and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as well as those years separating ASTP and the International Space Station Agreements are commonly explained by intractable negotiations on diplomatic fronts: wrangling over nonprolifera­tion treaties, controversy over interventions in the developing world, or the uncompromising political will of heads of state. Collaboration seems impossible at these times.

These two chapters aim to add breadth to that presumption, exploring Soviet – American collaboration through the following questions. To what degrees did representatives of NASA attempt to sustain collaborative activities since the 1957-1958 IGY? To what degree might collaborative activities have been shaped by the interests of researchers and policymakers representing state, national, and transnational scientific organizations?

It remains something of a paradox that the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/Russia have cooperated in space exploration for more than half a century. While their relations have been strained by fears of technol­ogy transfer, threatened by executive posturing, and reshaped by fiscal consider­ations, to fluctuating degrees individuals making up these research communities have labored steadily to share resources and exchange information.