Apparently, JFK was looking for ways to back down from his "man on the moon before the decade is out" challenge before he was shot in Dallas (because of the way the NASA budget was out of control, apparently). One of the options he was considering was apparently going to the Soviets and making the moon program a joint project between the two superpowers.
Now, even if JFK had championed such an international moon shot, there would be many hurdles to jump before a combined program could become a reality - the Soviets need to be interested, Congress would need to back it, Kennedy's administration would need to back it, the practical problems of how a combined program would be done would need to be worked out... But let's say that these are all overcome - what would the resulting program look like?
Given the American head start on their moon shot and their lead in materials science, I imagine that much of the hardware would be American - the Saturn V is almost assured to be the main launch vehicle, if the programs share space suits, then it is almost certain that the space suits were mostly American (though the Soviets could add some interesting improvements in a join space suit program), given the Apollo and Soyuz capsules' teething troubles, I wonder if we could end up with anything weird like a Saturn V launching a Soyuz-derived (I say derived because Soyuz would need to be re-designed to work with American hardware) capsule with an American-Soviet joint designed LEM?
What do other people think?
fasquardon