I've been inspired to post this by the knowledge that, because of COVID-19, we won’t be able to properly celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon. That day in June 1970 was a milestone in scientific and political development.
While I'll admit to some disappointment that the original plan to replicate the original mission fell through but as there's been no sign of C19 on the Moon I'm happy to keep it that way.
As for the rest, let’s start off with the elephant in the room; If you've read any of the more recent deep-dive histories on the subject, or even a lot of the press around the world at the time it's clear that this should never have happened! It wasn't just that it seems inconceivable at the time for the US and USSR to see eye-to-eye on any subject, it was that a brash young, unproven American President had recently told America and the world that a nation that had less than 15 minutes total "spaceflight" experience was going to put a man on the Moon and return him to the Earth, all in less than 10 years!
Everyone laughed except the US, the London Times wished us "well" but made it clear that they didn't believe it could be done! East Germany published a front page cartoon of Kennedy using a sling-shot to toss astronauts into space, aiming at the Moon but missing. And a few weeks later had an internal cartoon showing a Mercury capsule with a long-bearded astronaut in a Robinson Caruso scene looking longingly up at the Earth. And they weren't wrong with what was known of the American space program at the time.
I mean the Mercury was tiny compared to the Vostok, a third of the mass, half the volume, and the launch vehicles were even worse with the Atlas barely able to put the Mercury in orbit while the R7 had power to spare and was continually upgraded to this day! At the time the Mercury had only flown a single sub-orbital flight, while the Soviet Vostok had gone into orbit around the Earth on the first flight! The American’s seemed to substituting bravado for ability, how could anyone take them seriously?
But significantly the response from Moscow was subdued and cautious.
There was a good reason for this since only Moscow and those actually working on the Soviet space program knew and understood how marginal their lead was.
It went back to Sputnik and the unexpected reaction that the Soviet coup of launching the first artificial satellite had engendered. It reaped propaganda benefits and took the USSR from being a nation of 'tractor builders' to being perceived as on par with even the United States in technology and progress. At first as stunned as the US over the acclaim this feat brought many in the Kremlin and space program pushed for more and more 'firsts' and to pile as many humiliations on the US as possible. The very public failure of Vanguard 1 and the battery problems that led to the short lifetime of Explorer 1 seemed to only add to the reasons and the unmanned 'firsts' and missions continued to pile up.
Many were aware that Sputnik and it's ICBM launch vehicle the R6 had put spurs to the American missile development effort. With concentrated effort the American's had gone from almost no long range missile development in the early 50s to several medium and intermediate designs operationally deployed along with their Atlas missile which was soon to be joined by both the Titan and Minuteman ICBMs. Coupling a new, untested President and possibly another humiliation with the planned manned orbital flight (the Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster had not yet taken place but was in the end another factor that pushed Kennedy to the Moon) what would happen if the US committed seriously to this ongoing "Space Race"? What would the USSR have to do to stay in the lead, or even to keep up?
There's no direct evidence to support the supposition that forces in the Kremlin tried to delay Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight anymore there is direct evidence that Eisenhower and the White House delayed Vanguard to allow the Soviets to launch first so as to "settle" any possible over-flight protests had the US gone first. Still, there is some circumstantial evidence that the initial flight was delayed enough that had everything in the US gone as planned that Alan Sheppard would have been the first man into "space" and Gagarin the first man in orbit. But it didn't work out that way and Sheppard's flight was delayed. And whatever else the poorly kept 'secret' plans for a US sponsored invasion of Cuba was too much of provocation to ignore so five days before that disaster began Vostok 1 rose into the sky and Yuri Gagarin went into the history books.
And that double whammy proved far to much for Kennedy to ignore or set aside. As his own biography states he agonized and searched for any other possible 'counter' to the Soviet postion and in the end was convinced that the US going to the Moon on it's own was the only plausible goal that could be announced with a high certaintly that the US could win. So that's what he did on 25 May, 1961 in front of a joint session of Congress.
And within a few days he was regretting it, badly.
It was clear that NASA as it was organized, funded and operating would not be able to meet the goal and the agency as well as the fundamental way it was run and supported would have to drastically change. NASA Director Dryden was not happy about or supportive of such major changes nor the role he saw manned space flight having to take in the overall NASA organization in order to meet the goal and deadline Kennedy had set and he told Kennedy so and offered his resignation. But Kennedy convinced him to remain and undertake a series of cost-benefit analysis studies on various Lunar mission models including a joint mission with the Soviets.
This was no accident as he was already making plans to suggest to Soviet Premier Nikta Khrushchev such a joint mission when they met the next month, and which he did much to many peoples surprise including Khrushchev! While Khrushchev didn't take up the offer at that time, shortly after John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962 Kennedy and Khrushchev began a heavy exchange of letters and included Dryden and his Soviet counter-part Anatoll Biagonravov exchanging cooperative communications and meetings.
When the Soviet-American Space Cooperative Agreement was finalized in October it was pretty much overshadowed by the announcement of the Soviet-Cuban defense treaty and the demands of Turkey and Italy for the removal of American Intermediate Range nuclear missiles from their nations. Still by December when the agreement was presented to the UN there were clear signs that such an agreement was going to meet with pretty widespread acceptance. (It did after all become a core of the later UN Outer Space Treaty)
It’s been argued that Kennedy’s offer to Khrushchev of a joint lunar mission in the early 60s was the starting point of a process of détente and of serious nuclear disarmament in the latter part of the decade.
I'd say more the details are argued rather than the outcome because it was obviously the increased ability to quickly and easily communicate with each other during that critical year that arguably allowed both nations to not only talk but understand each other without all the rhetoric and paranoia getting in the way. The afore mentioned Cuban-Soviet defense treaty sent the American hawks and more than a small percentage of moderates ballistic. But as it came out over time the reasoning made sense since Cuba was terrified of another US invasion and the only other choice was to somehow elicit a promise from the US that they would never invade which was something Kennedy couldn't politically do. When Khrushchev privately informed Kennedy that the USSR had studied putting short and intermediate range nuclear weapons in Cuba as a 'deterrent' Kennedy was livid but when asked how having such US weapons in Italy and Turkey was any different he had no good answer. Especially since those nations had in fact been low level lobbying for their removal ever since they'd been deployed. When Kennedy went on national television to explain the missiles removal, (specifying as "at the request of the national government of Turkey and Italy") and graphically showing how "Allied" (but mostly US) weapons encircled the USSR that struck a chord.
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Probably more than that the withdrawal of some Soviet forces from East Germany and the beginnings of the Intermediate Weapons Treaty negotiations helped reduce some of the tensions in Europe. Meanwhile the admission of a Sino-Soviet split in Asia helped calm some Western fears of an aggressive and monolithic "Communist" bloc. it didn't immediately make everything great but it brought enough breathing room that the sides were more likely to talk than engage in proxy wars or exacerbate existing conflicts.
If the Joint Mission Programme hadn’t happened, perhaps Kennedy would have rowed back on his end of the decade deadline? Or cancelled it entirely?
Polling showed that half of America were 'meh' at best over the proposal. There were numerous other things Americans thought the government should spend the money on. Where this gets tricky is a solid majority believed and supported a continued expansion of the US military and a growing number wanted more "militarization" of space as a byproduct. The US and USSR military wanted to not only put up more spy satellites but actual weapons platforms and bombardment systems. I'm wondering if without the increased cooperation of OTL we wouldn't have seen a serious escalation of tensions instead. Keep in mind this is the period where the US Air Force was trying to pitch the Cis-Lunar Deterrent Force using nuclear bomb propelled Orion-battleships! I think if he'd gotten no support from Khrushchev on the idea then Kennedy would have had little choice but to ramp down the Lunar program to a more manageable level.
Maybe if Kennedy had died in Dallas in 1963, America would have pressed ahead on its own as a kind of tribute to its slain young president? In that case, perhaps it would have been someone like Gus Grissom who was the first man on the moon rather than Alexei Leonov?
Ok, first of all "Technically" and "legally" Grissom and Leonov DID set foot on the Moon at the same time. Gus admits his count was slightly behind Leonov's which is the whole reason the "who was REALLY first" debate exists. The way Alexei "flails" stepping off the landing pad pretty much shows he realized they weren't in sync but like they both kept saying, you have to pretty much 'pre-plan' movements in those suits for just about anything and 'stopping' is one of those things
And yes, I believe given the hype at the time that had Kennedy died the Lunar goal would have become a symbol of a "martyred" President but the Agreement was already in place it would be a question of how it was spun. As Kennedy himself admitted his popularity was on the rise again at the time and due to issues and delays in the joint program getting started in earnest there were calls for the US to go it alone. (Johnson was one of those voices which is why he and Kennedy were so strained) If Kennedy were killed that would have put Johnson in charge and it's not clear how supportive he was of the joint effort really. He tended to talk it up when it was a good for him and down when that served him better. He had positioned himself to be connected with "space" ever since Sputnik but his position as head of the US Space Council didn't convey the power and prestige I suppose he wanted as time went on.
Kennedy seemed kind of wistful when discussing the attempt since as he puts it he'd have gone out at a height in popularity which would have affected his legacy.
If space exploration remained a pawn of the Cold War, and a nationalist exercise in flags and footprints, would we still have moonbases at Clavius and Tchalinko?
I don't know if you've seen some of the more recent releases of what NASA has for the historical "Apollo" program which is what the US would have base their effort off of but I have REAL doubts it would have been affordable in any way unless they either gave it a lot more time, or a lot more money. I mean the Saturn C-V, the Saturn C-8? NOVA for hecks sake? The C-V was a monster but the C-8 or worse NOVA would have required a whole now Cape infrastructure and the program would have been spread out across the whole country to get those things built. And I don't see any way they were going to make those monsters reusable which is the only way to make space flight economic.
The Saturn-1 wasn't great but it had been built of parts that were essentially off-the-shelf and the Saturn-1B built on that. They'd actually tested various means of booster recovery in the late 50s and early 60s so when the time came making the booster able to be recovered and reused was pretty straight forward. Replacing the Apollo 'capsule' with a reusable glider and finally a recoverable upper stage broke the price-point barrier the same way the R6 eventually evolved into the fully reusable Buran. What allowed us to put the bases on the Moon (and go on to Mars) was the NERVA Lunar shuttle system. I'll be honest that I don't see any of this coming about in the rush to the Moon that would have had to happen to pull it off alone.
Let's be brutally honest here, NASA spending has been pretty steady if not particularly spectacular over the years but I've seen several of the budget estimates made for the various lunar landing concepts. They are not pretty and if real-world experience is anything to go by they are very likely low. To get to the Moon within the goal there were two basic methods: Earth Orbital Rendezvous (or EOR as it was known and which is what was used for the Joint Program mission) where multiple flights put pieces in orbit which are assembled, fueled and sent to the Moon. The other was Direct Ascent (DA) where the vehicle flew straight from Earth to the surface of the Moon and then back to Earth and the only way to do that with the known technology was one of those afore mentioned huge rockets.
The EOR made the most sense as it leveraged pretty much what they had and just used it more but it took more time. The Joint Mission BARELY made the June landing slot and that only because everything went right from the start and between two nations there was plenty of backup built in. But it cost a lot more up-front than something like Direct Ascent would have even if DA would have cost more in the long run. Such things matter in politics which is what is always going to be a driver
if you've read Buzz Aldrin's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon" book, (or better yet, seen the HBO mini-series) you'll know that the entire mission was very much (as he calls it
) "ducks" in that it looked fine above the water but underneath you're paddling like heck to keep your head above water
(According to Aldrin and Hayes the scene in the mini-series where they have to kit-bash the square Soviet CO2 filters to fit into the round US filter slots is totally true and was the reason the second mission was delayed a year to 'fix' that
)
DA would have been 'simpler' in a brute force kind of way so probably would have been chosen to meet the timetable but again, that pretty much means everything has to go right from the start. In the end I'm glad they didn't as I suspect the only booster they could likely have had ready for such a mission was the C-V and I'm not at all confident it could have done the job.
Could the Soviets have even gone on their own? Their N1 rocket showed some promise apparently but never flew once the Joint Programme started.
Well neither did that crazy "UR-700" monster the Soviets had in the background which is likely a good thing
It really depends on how serious they take the US announcement I suppose. The Soviet program up to the point of the Joint Program was kind of scattershot and conflicting and it took the fact the US was going to get a peek at that to settle things down. Mishen said that initially Glushko had outright refused to build engines for Korolev and as mentioned there were competing designs for a big "Moon" rocket out there but whether the Politburo would have supported a full program or what is open to question since they choose to go cooperative.
Take the US seriously and throw their support behind the N1, UR-700 or whatever that thing was from Yangel and I suppose it would have been a real race. If not then no, it would have been dependent on how committed the US was to the race.
My head-cannon says that it would have been most likely that the effort would have simply petered out since there wasn't a huge amount of interest from either side. And the butterflies from that are REALLY scary! I mean imagine no sat-net gaming or word-wide linkphones! How would I be typing this? Some dialup, land-line nightmare? ::::Shudder:::
Randy