United
States-Soviet Space Cooperation during the Cold War
By Roald Sagdeev,
University of Maryland, and Susan Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Institute Russian space scientist Roald Z. Sagdeev spent a large part of his career viewing NASA
from the Soviet Union’s side of the Cold War divide. Sagdeev,
the former head of the Russian Space Research Institute, now is the director
of the University of Maryland’s East-West Space Science Center. He wrote this
essay with his wife, Susan Eisenhower (President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
granddaughter) that traces the long, hard path to space cooperation until the
Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. The
Space Age spawned two outstanding space programs as a result of the hot
competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries
gave primary emphasis in their space efforts to a combination of national
security and foreign policy objectives, turning space into an area of active
competition for political and military advantage. At first, this charged
political environment accommodated nothing more than symbolic gestures of
collaboration. Only in the late 1980s, with warming political relations, did
momentum for major space cooperation begin to build. As the Soviet Union
neared collapse, with its ideological underpinnings evaporating, the impetus
for the arms race and competition in space declined, allowing both countries
to seriously pursue strategic partnerships in space. The bumpy U.S.-U.S.S.R.
relationship in the years between 1957 and 1991 often was characterized by
periods of mistrust and overt hostility (e.g., the U-2 incident, Cuban
Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and President
Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”). Periods
of détente, in contrast, led to the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in 1963, the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972, and an emerging U.S.-Soviet
rapprochement during 1985-1991. Throughout this political roller-coaster
period of history, both countries increased areas of coop-eration,
including space, as a symbol of warmer relations while cutting cooperation
off when ties worsened. The birth of the Space Age
following the Soviet launch of Sputnik came out of the confluence of two
seemingly incompatible developments. From the end of World War II, the
Soviets made rockets their most important military asset. By the mid-1950s,
they were ready to test their first intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM). In 1957, the International Geophysical Year was launched, a
multinational effort to study Earth on a comprehensive, coordinated basis. To
highlight the effort, organizers had urged the United States and the Soviet
Union to consider launching a scientific satellite. On Oct. 4, 1957, a
seemingly routine test launch of a Soviet ICBM (now known as the R-7 rocket)
carried the first artificial satellite to orbit. Sputnik’s launch had dramatic repercussions for the Cold
War rivals. After reaping the first political dividends from military rocket
technology, the Soviets continued to pursue a highly classified
military-industrial approach in developing its space program. Conversely, the
U.S. government decided to make NASA a purely civilian enterprise, while
focusing its military space efforts in the Pentagon and intelligence
community. Early on, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower pursued U.S.-Soviet cooperative space initiatives through a series
of letters he sent in 1957 and 1958 to the Soviet leadership, first to Prime
Minister Nikolai Bulganin and then to Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower
suggested creating a process to secure space for peaceful uses. Khrushchev,
however, rejected the offer and demanded the United States eliminate its
forward-based nuclear weapons in places like Turkey as a precondition for any
space agreement. Feeling triumphant after Sputnik’s launch, Khrushchev was
certain his country was far ahead of the United States in terms of rocket
technology and space launch capabilities, unlike the Soviet Union’s more
vulnerable geostrategic position in the nuclear arena. This would be the
first of many times when space was linked with nuclear disarmament and other
political issues. Meanwhile,
the United States energetically proceeded with its multinational initiative
under the umbrella of the United Nations to develop a legal framework for
peaceful space activities. This eventually led to the Outer Space Treaty and
creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,
which a reluctant Soviet Union eventually joined. In the scientific community, the
role of an international space science union was assumed by the Committee on
Space Research, with its unusual charter giving a mandate to both superpowers
to appoint vice presidents. This arrangement opened an opportunity for
dialogue and informal contacts between American and Soviet space officials.
Academician Anatoli A. Blagonravov, the Soviet
Union’s representative for negotiating multilateral space science cooperation
agreements, became the group’s first appointed vice president. However,
nothing could happen in the body without Kremlin approval. I vividly remember a farewell
conversation with Blagonravov, when he was
preparing to retire from the Soviet space program. Blagonravov,
an outstanding artillery engineer and general of the prerevolutionary Russian
army who managed to survive during the Soviet regime, strongly advised me to
keep the committee link alive. That would require a lot of domestic diplomacy,
he thought. Indeed, my very first hurdle was to persuade the Kremlin not to
kill Soviet participation in the 1977 conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. The civilian nature of NASA,
legislated in the 1958 Space Act, made it possible for the American researchers
to collaborate on and disseminate scientific advances, an opportunity envied
by many of us Soviet scientists. The actual work and industrial efforts for
the Soviet space program were run under the classified umbrella of the
Ministry of General Machine Building, with its enormous and rapidly expanding
network of design bureaus and production facilities. The military was its
principal client. The military also owned and operated every launch site and
the network of ground control centers. The ministry had to report to the
Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Commission on Military-Industrial
Issues of the Council of Ministers. Work beyond defense contracts was given
secondary priority. As a result of this critical
dependence on the military, the Soviet aerospace industry relied entirely on
domestic hardware, all the way down to the tiniest individual
micro-components. This resulted in an internationally isolated technological
culture that would have created enormous barriers of incompatibility for any
joint endeavor. In
April 1960, in advance of a planned Eisenhower-Khrushchev sum-mit meeting, the leadership of Moscow’s scientific
community was anticipating a chance for major breakthroughs in bilateral
cooperation, perhaps including the space area, following Eisenhower’s “Atoms
for Peace” initiative. However, the much expected summit was cancelled in the
aftermath of the May 1 downing of a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. I
was beginning my scientific career at the heart of the Soviet nuclear
establishment, now known as the Kurchatov
Institute, and was very disappointed Eisenhower would not be visiting the
institute as had been rumored. Early in his presidency, John F.
Kennedy made repeated attempts to engage the Soviet Union in space
cooperation. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said, “Let both sides seek to
invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore
the stars.’’ Khrushchev, still persuaded of the eternal supremacy of Soviet
rocketry, was not moved. Less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration,
on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to
escape Earth’s gravity. In the aftermath of his brief flight, the piloted
component of the Soviet space program rapidly grew to become indisputably
dominant over any other type of space activity. Official Soviet propaganda
was obsessed with everything that happened in orbit, including elaborate
descriptions of the cosmonauts’ menu at their last breakfast and all of the
details of their physical exercise program. Every launch produced several
more “Heroes of the Soviet Union,” and more photographs of space superstars
embraced by Khrushchev. At the same time, the Soviets were left far behind in
other key areas of space technology. Their first geostationary
telecommunication satellite was launched 11 years after its American
counterpart. In the case of getting meteorological data from a geostationary
location, the gap was even bigger. Despite the continued space
competition between the United States and U.S.S.R., Khrushchev sent Kennedy a
letter raising the possibility of space cooperation on a modest level after
John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. That led
to two rounds of discussions between NASA’s Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden
and Soviet academician Blagonravov. An agreement
led to the opening of cooperation in three areas: 1) the exchange of weather
data from satellites and the eventual coordinated launching of meteorological
satellites; 2) a joint effort to map the geomagnetic field of Earth; and 3)
cooperation in the experimental relay of communications. This link became a
primary forum for subsequent U.S.-U.S.S.R. interaction on space. There
were large differences between the two negotiating partners. The Soviet
Academy of Sciences did not run the space program, but rather served as an
official front for a vast network of secret enterprises controlled by the
military and Communist Party apparatus. An asymmetry existed also in the fact
that while the Russians knew about the American planning process, everything
about the Soviet space program was a classified secret. In meetings among
scientists, we often were approached by our colleagues at NASA asking us to
disclose plans about what we were going to do next with Mars, Venus and other
planets. It was difficult to persuade our Soviet authorities, including the
president of the Academy of Sciences, academician Mstislav
Keldysh,
that we should reciprocate. The Soviet system had a different culture
and mentality. Academician Keldysh himself was the
subject of paranoid secrecy. For many years, Keldysh’s
name was a state secret. He was known only as the anonymous “chief theorist
of cosmonautics.” Sergei Korolev, the founder of
the Soviet space and rocketry program, was less fortunate. His role as “chief
designer of cosmonautics” became official only posthumously. Following the ouster of Khrushchev
in October 1964, the new Soviet leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and his
colleagues took even a harder line toward overall U.S.-Soviet relations.
Brezhnev previously had served as the curator of the military industry on
behalf of the Politburo. He knew well there was a “missile gap” in favor of
the United States, and he was about to embark on an unprecedented build up of deterrent forces. The negative atmosphere at
higher levels was reflected in the Soviet academy’s dealings with NASA.
Soviet opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam led to more bitterness. In December 1968, only weeks after
Richard Nixon’s election, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, followed by the lunar
landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union experienced a
series of failures in its manned lunar program. The opportunity for using
dramatic space cooperation efforts as a means of reducing the U.S.-Soviet
Cold War rivalry had passed. As painful as it was for the Soviet leadership,
the time of their country’s dominance in heavy rocket launching technology
was over. Cooperation in space now would have to come at more modest levels.
The triumph of the Apollo program signified a crucial benchmark in the
superpower space race by ending Soviet leadership in space exploration. The
Soviet Union was simply unable to match such large-scale U.S. efforts. Nor did
the Soviets have an institutional structure like NASA that was capable of
running a program like Apollo in an open and transparent way. While not ready
to publicly admit their defeat, the Soviets argued that scientific work on
the moon could be better achieved robotically. Unmanned Soviet lunar
missions, initially introduced as a shadow program with a much smaller budget
than the manned version, occurred at the same time as the Apollo program. The
Lunokhod moon rovers and sample return probes
earned a great deal of admiration from international scientists. However,
inside their close circle, the Soviet leaders, in a rude awakening, conceded
that the era of Soviet dominance in space was gone forever. Cynics in the
Soviet space community added an insult to the injury in the form of a “bad
news, good news” joke drawing on a growing irritant for Kremlin – rapidly
deteriorating relations with China. According to the joke, the bad news was,
“The Chinese have landed on the moon. So what is the good news? It’s all of
them.” The
challenge for both sides was determining where to go next. While the
Americans eventually pursued the development of the space shuttle, the
Soviets embarked on a program to place crews in space for extended periods of
time by building the Salyut series of orbital space stations. In reality, that space station
program was not the result of major brainstorming or serious debates about a
new national vision for space exploration. It came from the spontaneous
process of internal competition between rivals within the Soviet aerospace
industry. The Soviet military initially supported the approach, which was
reminiscent of the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory project, which
was canceled in 1969 after a single, unmanned launch. Reflecting military
priorities, the key instrument on early Salyut stations was a big optical
Earth observation camera, the Soviet version of “open skies” technology. Of
course, official propaganda said this mission had nothing to do with military
interests. However, sharp tongues inside the space establishment jokingly
asked, “Why do these brave men in orbit sleep when flying over our country,
but stay alert over America?” After this type of assignment was
passed to unmanned spy satellites, the real motivation for expanding the
Salyut program became the desire to undertake long-duration flight. Longevity
records for humans in space became the benchmark for judging the success of
these flights. In order to move in that direction, the Salyut program worked
to excel in two important areas: achieving the safety of its manned flight
hardware and developing a solid base in space medicine. Eventually, these
would be two of the most important contributions the Russians would make to
the International Space Station partnership. In the early 1970s, the Nixon
administration sought to reduce U.S.-Soviet tensions, and launched a major
effort to reach a strategic arms limitation breakthrough, as well as new
cooperation in space. In 1970, during a meeting with Keldysh,
U.S. Academy of Sciences President Philip Handler mentioned an American movie
starring Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman called Marooned, in which Soviet
cosmonauts helped rescue three U.S. astronauts stranded in Earth orbit.
Handler suggested the United States and U.S.S.R. develop a mutually com-patible docking system that would make possible such
rescues, as well as non-emergency space dock-ings.
This imaginary movie scenario touched a chord within space communities on
both sides, which already had experienced emergency situations in real life.
Talks led to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking mission of 1975, which
developed compatible rendezvous and docking systems still in use today, and
the establishment of a few topical working groups in different space science
and applications disciplines. Implementation of Apollo-Soyuz
cooperation was dictated by the political will of the two countries’
political leadership. The cooperation presented a serious management
challenge for both sides, given the overall lack of compatibility between the
two space programs. NASA had to work with a counterpart that could not even
be clearly identified. The Ministry of General Machine Building was still
shrouded in secrecy and Soviet authorities instructed the Academy of Sciences
to act as a cover for all activities during Apollo-Soyuz. Soviet industry
experts had to introduce themselves as employees of the Institute of Space
Research and military officers from Soviet Space Command changed into
civilian clothes while insisting that the Soviet academy administered the
launch site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The huge Soviet space
military-industrial “iceberg” at that time could find only a tiny place at
the tip of this colossus to deal with foreign visitors. Even if the Institute
of Space Research was unable from a practical standpoint to serve as the sole
counterpart to NASA’s Apollo team, we were given instructions to at least
pretend. We had to puff up our chests and represent the heart of the Soviet
space program while it was clear to everyone that we were nothing but a bunch
of scientists – the poor relatives of the rich space czars. Well
before the critical moments of the Apollo-Soyuz project when the crowds of
American participants went to visit the manned flights control center in the
Moscow suburb of Kaliningrad and the Soyuz launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, our authorities issued a long and detailed
secret questionnaire. It suggested the appropriate answers to hundreds of
questions that might be asked by the “nosy Americans.” The reading of this
questionnaire at a board of directors meeting brought great fun and pride to
us. These were some of the questions: “The imaginary American asks at
the control center of Kaliningrad, ‘Who is essentially running this
installation?’ Or a similar question at the Baikonur Cosmodrome,
where military servicemen would have most probably just changed their
uniforms for civilian clothes: ‘Who is responsible for supervising and
running this Cosmodrome?’ We were very excited to
respond to these queries. The recommended answer was always ‘the Institute of
Space Research and academician Sagdeev.’” I felt like the Marquis de Carabas from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, Puss in
Boots – the apparent “owner of all the territory the eye could see.” Despite this artifice, the docking
in orbit in July 1975 was a rare and dramatic display of U.S.-Soviet
friendliness during the depths of the Cold War. Leonid Brezhnev and President
Gerald Ford exchanged messages of friendship and congratulations. This was to
be the last dramatic international handshake in space for years to come. Soon
after the flight, both sides met to discuss potential follow-on space
projects and agreed to establish a special bilateral working group. I chaired
the Soviet group and worked with NASA’s Charles Kennel on a scenario in which
a specialized science module, a blend of Russian and American station
designs, could be delivered to orbit by the U.S. space shuttle.
Unfortunately, politics intervened again. Incoming President Jimmy Carter was
concerned by congressional charges that the Soviets had obtained valuable
U.S. technology during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. By late 1978, the
Carter administration had ended discussions on additional cooperation with
the Soviets. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, any hope
of significant cooperation in space was gone. The United States pursued
cooperation with Europe through projects such as a Spacelab module that could
ride aboard the space shuttle, while the Soviets maintained their focus on flying
the manned Salyut space stations. On
the planetary exploration front, we were quite impressed by the successes of
the Mars Viking missions and the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune and the outer limits of the solar system. At the same time the
principal Soviet robotic missions were repeatedly directed toward Venus. Every year as director of the
Soviet Space Research Institute, I had to report on the completion of each
important mission to a very large audience in Moscow at the Polytechnic
Museum, which is a counterpart to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in
Washington, D.C. Each time, while learning about the new steps in a deeper
penetration into the mysteries of Venus, my audience would ask, “While we
keep sending spacecraft to Venus only, the American spacecraft visit Mars,
Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and so on. Why
couldn’t we have such projects?” “You know,” I responded, “we have
a silent gentleman’s agreement to share responsibilities in space. While the
Americans are doing wide-range reconnaissance in the solar system, we are
carrying on an intensive study of Venus, just as if that planet were declared
the planetary test range of our space science.” At another meeting, while
reporting on the latest Venera spacecraft landing
on the surface of Venus, I had to confront the same questions. This time, I
was literally bewildered and without much thinking, immediately answered the
question of why Americans do such and such: “Because they are sons of
bitches,” I replied. For several minutes, the audience
gave a standing ovation. It was clear they were applauding the Americans and
their space program, which had captured the imagination of the Soviets,
despite the attempts of our official propaganda to undermine the achievements
of those “sons of bitches.” Nevertheless, the Soviet robotic
space program advanced by learning from and adapting to U.S. achievements.
Anticipating the success of the U.S. Viking mission, the Soviet Academy of
Sciences decided to abandon Mars as a priority and see how the American
program would develop. The open and predictable nature of the U.S. space
program gave Soviet scientists an opportunity to find their own niche with
realistic projects that would have a scientific impact and avoid direct
competition. Our Venera
program to Venus was quite successful. Following simplistic probes in the
late 1960s, we managed to deliver sophisticated hardware to the planet’s
surface in 1975 and send back panoramic pictures. Because the United States
and U.S.S.R. agreed to share the results of NASA’s Pioneer Venus mission in
1978 and the Soviet Venera missions, scientists and
space experts on both sides placed enormous symbolic and scientific value on
the results of these joint efforts. U.S.-Soviet
cooperation in life sciences and biomedical research also took root in the
1970s. In 1977, seven U.S. biological experiments or medical devices flew
aboard the Soviet Cosmos 936 mission, which also carried experiments from
France and a number of Soviet bloc countries. This mission investigated the
impact of long-duration spaceflight on the human body. A later Cosmos
mission, Cosmos 1129 in 1979, carried 17 additional U.S. experiments and
devices. And on May 6, 1979, the United States and U.S.S.R signed a treaty
that provided for the deployment of an international system of emergency
beacon receivers aboard satellites. When Ronald Reagan was elected to
the presidency in 1981, Cold War tensions were rising. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, imposition of martial law in Poland and NATO’s placement of
Pershing rockets and cruise missiles in Europe – which was countered by
hurried deployment of the Soviets’ SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles –
characterized the tenor of the period. In the midst of the Poland martial law
crisis, the Reagan administration announced on Dec. 29, 1981, that it would
allow the U.S.-Soviet space cooperation agreement, due for renewal in May
1982, to lapse. Mutual suspicion grew to the point that the Soviets began
attributing potentially aggressive intentions to the Space Shuttle Program.
It would be another 10 years before the conditions finally were ripe again
for cooperation. Nevertheless, in the absence of a
formal intergovernmental agreement, the White House authorized low-profile
cooperation on a case-by-case basis. Among the activities that continued were
the satellite-based search and rescue efforts, which was based on the
coordinated use of the U.S.-Canadian-French SARSAT and the Soviet COSPAS
satellites to locate airplanes or ships in distress. By the mid-1980s, the
effort had helped save more than 400 people. NASA also was allowed to
continue working with the Soviet Union in space biology and medicine. As part
of that effort, four U.S. medical devices were used in experiments on the
1983 Cosmos 1514 mission, which was devoted to primate research. That tacit
format of interaction led by Soviet academicians Oleg Gazenko
and Anatoly Grigoriev and NASA’s Dr. Arnauld Nicogossian, later
would serve as an example for future cooperation between the Russian space
station Mir and space shuttle programs and on the International Space
Station. Meanwhile, exchanges of planetary data continued, but discussions of
future cooperation in planetary exploration were cancelled. The U.S. side was pragmatic about
keeping up its contacts with Soviet scientists during these times times of political tensions. Regular consultations on
space science-related issues, for example, were carried out through a channel
between the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of
Sciences. Americans were keenly interested in learning about the effects of
long-duration flights on the human body – an area where the Soviets enjoyed a
monopoly during NASA’s six-year hiatus in human spaceflight from 1975-1981. In
addition to these cooperative activities, Soviet and American space
scientists regularly met at Committee on Space Research sessions. Aerospace
engineers and officials from industry also maintained a similar engagement
under the umbrella of the International Astronautical
Federation. During what many would consider
the coldest period of bilateral relations in the early 1980s, these contacts
produced a very special cooperative project that sought to explore Halley’s
comet. The United States and U.S.S.R. both participated in the Interagency
Consultative Group, which was set up in 1981 to bring together space and
ground-based studies of the comet during its 1986 passage through the inner
solar system. After deciding not to send a
spacecraft to view the comet, the United States agreed to play a supporting
role, which involved providing ground-based observation data on the comet.
This data was used to support the parallel Soviet Vega 1, Vega 2 and European
Space Agency Giotto missions. The success of the encounter with the comet was
to be critically dependent on precise navigation. Scientists from NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, suggested a brilliant
technical scenario for the Vega and Giotto spacecraft to use at the approach
to the comet. This had to be done a few days prior to the arrival of Giotto
in order to help it home in on the celestial whereabouts of the ultimate
target: the comet’s elusive nucleus. The whole procedure required close
cooperation in real time. NASA’s Deep Space Network was given all of the
necessary parameters from the Soviet spacecraft communications systems, then
both sides performed pre-flight calibration tests of the hardware. This
helped Giotto navigate much closer to the comet’s nucleus, providing
scientists with outstanding data and producing some of the most awe-inspiring
video footage ever taken in space. Several months before, when the Soviet
Vega spacecraft had to release meteorological ballons
in the atmosphere of Venus, the Deep Space Network played a crucial role in
getting the first direct signals from these balloons and continued to track
them as they were buffeted by Venus’ unusual atmospheric circulation. Ironically, such successes were
achieved despite continued chilly relations between the two governments.
Several private groups, however, worked to keep U.S.-Soviet space ties alive.
Among them was the new Planetary Society, which was created in 1979 by
well-known astronomer Carl Sagan, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director
Bruce Murray, and their associate, physicist Louis Friedman. After its
founding in 1985, the Association of Space Explorers, composed of people who
had flown in space, also became an important forum for discussions on the
benefits of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in human spaceflight. These efforts would
provide a powerful impetus for getting stalled U.S.-Soviet space cooperation
back on track. Not long after Ronald Reagan was
elected president, NASA urged him to approve a space station to rival the Soviet
station program. In his January 1984 State of the Union address, Reagan
announced he was directing NASA to “develop a permanently manned space
station … within the decade” and “invite other countries to participate.”
Peggy Finarelli, a senior official in NASA’s
international office at the time, recalled that Reagan’s approval of what
became known as Space Station Freedom was “a leadership issue very much in
the context of the Cold War. We were challenging the Soviets in the high
ground of space. We had to say that Freedom would be bigger and better than
the Soviet space station.” The original estimate was that Freedom would cost
about $8 billion. It was envisioned to be in orbit by 1992 in order to
celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of
America. While
the Soviets were not invited to join the Freedom project, the Reagan
administration indicated its willingness to resume space cooperation with the
U.S.S.R. prior to the 1984 State of the Union address. Only days before the
speech, the administration privately suggested to Moscow a simulated space
rescue demonstration mission in which U.S. astronauts from the space shuttle
would assist Soviet cosmonauts aboard a Salyut station. Both privately and
publicly, the Soviet response was cool, because of the perceived asymmetry of
a mission in which the Soviet crew was in trouble and the U.S. crew would act
as rescuers. The Soviet government also revived
the notion from the Khrushchev era that space cooperation would be possible
only if there were progress in space arms control. The primary point of
contention was the Reagan administration’s proposed Strategic Defense
Initiative, which had been announced in March 1983. From the start of the
Reagan administration, however, pressure for cooperation in space had been
mounting. For example, Sen. “Spark” Matsunaga from Hawaii was among those
warning of the dangers of weaponizing space and
calling for an “internationally developed space station as an alternative.” The U.S. Senate issued a more formal
call for renewal of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation with passage of Joint
Resolution 236 on Oct. 10, 1984. President Reagan signed the resolution on
Oct. 30, noting U.S. readiness “to work with the Soviets on cooperation in
space in pro-grams which are mutually beneficial and productive.” When Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as
the Soviet leader in 1985, Reagan thought he had found a willing partner.
Gorbachev was interested in reducing the Soviet defense budget, and with the
so-called Euromissile issue still unresolved, his
government quickly signaled its readiness for a new round of arms control
negotiations with the United States. When Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva
that November to discuss arms control, they also signed an agreement on
scientific cooperation. Once again, cooperation was symbolic of a thaw in the
Cold War. However, Gorbachev still expressed strong Soviet opposition to the
Strategic Defense Initiative and space was not included in the agreement. The
Soviets had linked space cooperation to a demand that the United States
abandon its plans for the initiative altogether. Only
three months after the Geneva summit, a tragedy occurred that would set the
U.S. space program back several years – the space shuttle Challenger
disaster. Little noticed at the time was a diplomatic breakthrough that
occurred only a few weeks after the Challenger accident. On Feb. 20, 1986,
the Soviets launched the first of six modules that eventually would comprise
the Mir space station, and in the wake of the Challenger accident and the
launch of Mir, the Kremlin finally agreed to decouple non-military space
issues from the Strategic Defense Initiative. The United States and the
Soviet Union subsequently signed a five-year agreement on space cooperation
in April 1987. A number of joint scientific projects were agreed to, although
there was no mention of cooperation in human spaceflight. More importantly,
in an exchange of letters between Gorbachev and Reagan the previous summer,
the link between arms control progress and renewed space cooperation was
dropped. This paved the way for both sides to take meaningful steps toward
actual cooperation. During their last Moscow summit in
May 1988, Gorbachev invited Reagan to walk inside the Kremlin yard. Passing
by impressive historic artifacts like the “Czar Cannon” that never fired, and
the “Czar Bell,” that never tolled, the last Soviet president tried to lure
his guest into agreeing to support a joint manned mission to Mars. Only time
will tell if this project will come to pass or serve as another dead artifact
of history. Professor John Logsdon from George
Washington University also contributed to this article. |
Dunbar, Brian. “United States-Soviet Space Cooperation during the Cold War.” NASA, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html