Or, Brother Fidel has a bigger pragmatic streak and realizes he needs to play both sides against the middle.
Not a snowball's chance... Castro was a leftist revolutionary who had built his whole project on opposition to the corrupt Batista regime. So when he won his revolution, he nationalized the businesses at the heart of Batista's economic base - which happened to be well-connected American businesses. For Castro not to nationalize them, he becomes another "American stooge" running Cuba and gets overthrown by a subordinate or the next revolutionary movement to come along.
The only chance for Castro to remain non-aligned is for the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations not to decide that he was an enemy and a Moscow stooge and that dealing with a Cuba that wanted a more equal relationship was in US interests. That's not terribly likely. The US lost significantly in the revolution (and to be more specific, people who had links with key Eisenhower administration figures lost heavily), and at the time it was not at all clear that responding aggressively would make things worse.
So Castro's association with Moscow was a
product of a broad pragmatic streak - the USSR could save him from facing a US invasion. Similarly, Moscow engaged with Castro for utterly pragmatic reasons. Moscow didn't like Castro very much - they thought he had a monstrous ego and he kept trying to suck them into supporting his wars/revolutions around the world. Also, the Cubans weren't ideologically "sound".
Well, apparently the Russians were on verge of saying yes when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Butterflying that wouldn't be that hard, you just need to have JFK not go to Dallas in November, 1963, and apparently NASA was on-board for a joint Russian-American moon program and so was the Pentagon. They were both eager to get a look at the Russians' hardware, some of which the astronauts were reportedly very impressed by in OTL. The design the Russians came up with for their lander supposedly could have landed on slopes of up to twenty degrees. The Apollo LEM didn't like slopes of more than five degrees, and the Russians' Krechet suit was the first to be designed to be entered through a rear hatch.There's a lot that the Russians can bring to a joint moon program. The real hurdle is Congress. Congress had threatened to pull NASA's funding if they tried to proceed with a joint space project with the Russians.
Hm, I didn't know that the idea had gotten so far - nor that support for the idea was so wide. Where did you find these details?
Not at all surprised that Congress opposed the idea though.
From what I've read the Krechet was limited by its materials - i.e. it didn't have the flexibility that the Apollo suits had, which would lead to the cosmonauts on the moon tiring much quicker. Maybe that was hokum though...
Weren't the Soviet and American landers both just gleams in the eyes of their designers in 1963?
If you thought the turf wars were bad on either side of the curtain IOTL, just wait until you get Glushko trying to sell Von Braun on the idea of a 200-tonne-to-LEO hypergollic-propellant rocket, or some other strange argument.
Heck yes. There really were some big egos on both programs in the 60s. I can definitely see personal friction or bureaucratic friction bringing the whole effort down.
On the other hand, the political classes would have publicly committed to working together for the bureaucratic clashes to be an issue - that could result in more pressure to work together...
For political reasons, I suspect that an Earth Orbit Rendezvous scheme with Direct Ascent from the Moon is most likely. Each side gets to demonstrate its heavy-lifting prowess, and the US gets to make the launch of the crew a spectator event, with Saturn I and later IB launching from Florida to meet Proton-launched cargo in orbit, forming a cumbersome TLI stack with an internationally-designed capsule (probably an Apollo CSM with a Soviet-built landing stage, given Apollo's greater volume) on top. The Soviets launch their crew members up on a Soyuz, the Americans on yet another Apollo CM, the crews board the craft in LEO.
Yes... I have a feeling that the political requirements of such a program would mean multiple launches by each party assembling a moonship in orbit, rather than one country hosting large numbers of people from the other... Most likely that would mean a moon-landing in the early to mid 70s.
On the bright side, this almost certainly leads to a more sustainable space program for both parties, since neither needs to develop massive rockets like the Saturn V and N1.
Once Brezhnev takes power, I suspect that the program will fall apart after the first landing and the two space powers will go their separate ways.
Why do you think Brezhnev being in power would lead to the program falling apart?
What happens in the 1970s is anyone's guess. The American aerospace sector is overall probably weaker and gets less support from Nixon and Congress as a result, so maybe the Shuttle doesn't get funded, and we instead get something like Eyes-Turned-Skyward-lite, with Saturn IB-launched Apollo capsules performing early Space Station experiments with craft launched on Saturn IBs or Titans.
Hm. I could see an opposite reaction, where at the end of the joint program, there is a nationalistic push for "full space independance" - probably including some shuttle. I wonder what a US shuttle program (or shuttle, space station and orbital tug program) could do if given Apollo-level funding? (Not that I think such high funding levels are likely, even if there was a surge of do-it-ourselves nationalism.)
Equally, the two space programs could become too intertwined to be pulled apart (not for any major engineering or economic reason - but because joint programs continue to be seen as politically useful and mildly economic) sort of like how the Russian and American programs are now.
fasquardon
