The time JFK tried to make the space race a partnership

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged the Soviet Union to a race to the moon. 

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” he said before a joint session of Congress.   

On Sept. 12, 1962, at Rice University in Houston, Kennedy reiterated his call for a moon race: 

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Yet, just over a year after the Rice University speech, JFK tried to stop the moon race in an address before the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, 1963. He questioned if the journey should be “a matter of national competition” and why preparation for the U.S. and Soviet Union involved “immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure.”

“Surely, we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries — indeed of all the world — cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.”

What caused President Kennedy to switch from racing the Soviets to the moon to proposing a joint Soviet-American moon mission? The phrase “indeed of all the world” implied that JFK was thinking of other nations as partners besides the two superpowers.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis came close to destroying the world, JFK strove to soften relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. As an article in the History Channel notes, the White House-Kremlin hotline had been established. The two countries had signed an above-ground nuclear test ban treaty. The attempt to turn the Apollo moon race into a joint Soviet-American lunar mission was just one more initiative to cool tensions between the superpowers.

Also, by September 1963, the idea of an expensive race to the moon was starting to get some pushback. The shock of Sputnik and Gagarin’s first flight had started to fade. The costs, $20 billion in 1963 dollars, seemed horrendous to some. A joint Soviet-American moon mission would not only give a new rationale for going to the moon that some of the critics might find more agreeable but would involve cost sharing, reducing the expense.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the Kennedy proposal did not receive much support, either from the Soviet Union or the United States. Two months after the U.N. speech, the matter became moot when Lee Harvey Oswald gunned President Kennedy down in Dallas. Congress passed a spending bill that prohibited any money to be used for a joint mission. President Lyndon Johnson championed the space race throughout the sixties. On July 20, 1969, Americans walked in triumph on the lunar surface, winning a decisive victory in the Cold War.

Ironically, President Richard Nixon, the man Kennedy defeated in 1960, succeeded in executing a joint Soviet-American space mission after America’s moon race victory. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which took place in 1975, less than a year after Nixon was forced to resign from the presidency due to the Watergate scandal, involved docking an American and a Soviet spacecraft in low Earth orbit and the famous handshake in space. The mission was more symbolic than substantive.

More joint space missions between the Russians and the Americans would not occur for almost 20 years. The famous celebrity scientist Carl Sagan proposed a joint Soviet-American mission to Mars in the 1980s, but the idea came to naught.

President Bill Clinton made joint Russian-American space missions a lasting reality when he invited the Russian Federation to participate in the International Space Station in the early 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. The policy has proven to be so successful that it has even survived the chilling of relations in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Joint space missions between enemies are harder to achieve than many might hope. That fact is something to consider as we face a new cold war and a new space race with China, the latest threat to world peace and freedom. China can join the international community in the next missions to the moon but only after it chooses to be a good world citizen.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.