Space Exploration

IV

The Politics of Space Exploration

Space exploration requires more than just science—it requires an enormous amount of money. The amount of money that a country is willing to invest in space exploration depends on the political climate of the time. During the Cold War, a period of tense relations between the United States and the USSR, both countries poured huge amounts of money into their space programs, because many of the political and public opinion battles were being fought over superiority in space. After the Cold War, space exploration budgets in both countries shrank dramatically.

A

The Space Race and the Cold War

Space exploration became possible at the height of the Cold War, and superpower competition between the United States and the USSR gave a boost to space programs in both nations. Indeed, the primary impact of Sputnik was political—in the United States Sputnik triggered nationwide concern about Soviet technological prowess. When the USSR succeeded in putting the first human into space, it only added to the disappointment and shame felt by many Americans, and especially by President Kennedy. Against this background, Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight on May 5, 1961, was a welcome cause for celebration. Twenty days later Kennedy told Congress, “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.” This was the genesis of the Apollo program. Although there were other motivations for going to the Moon—scientific exploration among them—Cold War geopolitics was the main push behind the Moon race. Cold War competition also affected the unpiloted space programs of the United States and USSR.

A

1

The Moon Race

During the piloted programs of the Moon race, the pressure of competition caused Soviet leaders to order a number of “space spectaculars,” as much for their propaganda value as for their contributions. Each Voskhod flight entailed significant risks to the cosmonauts—the Voskhod 1 crew flew without space suits, while Voskhod 2’s Alexei Leonov was almost unable to reenter his craft following his historic spacewalk. But the space spectacular the Soviets wanted most of all—a piloted mission around the Moon in time for the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution—never came to pass. By December 1968, when the Apollo 8 astronauts flew around the Moon, it was clear that victory in the Moon race had gone to the United States.

The achievement of Kennedy’s goal, with the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, signaled a new era in space exploration in the United States—but not as NASA had hoped. Instead of accepting NASA’s proposals for a suite of ambitious post-Apollo space programs, Congress backed off on space funding, with the space shuttle as the only major space program to gain approval. In time it became clear that the lavish space budgets of the 1960s had been a product of a unique time in history, in which space was the most visible arena for superpower competition.

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A

2

After the Moon

Tensions between the superpowers eased somewhat in the early 1970s, and the United States and USSR joined forces for the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Nevertheless, Cold War suspicions continued to influence space planners in both nations in the 1970s and 1980s. Both sides continued to spend enormous sums on missiles and nuclear warheads. Missiles of the Cold War arms race were designed to fly between continents on a path that took them briefly into space during their journeys. In the United States, a great deal of research went into a space-based antimissile system called the Strategic Defense Initiative (known to the public as Star Wars), which was never built. The stockpiling of missiles was eventually slowed by the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) treaties.

In the USSR, concerns over possible offensive uses of the U.S. space shuttle helped prompt the development of the heavy-lift launcher Energia and the space shuttle Buran. Economic hardships, however, forced the suspension of both programs. The economy worsened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, threatening the now-Russian space program with extinction.

B

After the Cold War

In 1993 the U.S. government redefined NASA’s plans for an international space station to include Russia as a partner, a development that would not have been possible before the end of the Cold War. An era of renewed cooperation in space between Russia and the United States followed, highlighted by flights of cosmonauts on the space shuttle and astronauts on the Mir space station.

Meanwhile, other nations have staged their own programs of unpiloted and piloted space missions. Many have been conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA), formed in 1975, whose 13 member nations include France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom. European astronauts visited Mir and have flown on shuttle missions. Since the late 1970s, a series of European rockets called Ariane have launched a significant percentage of commercial satellites. ESA’s activities in planetary exploration have included probes such as Huygens, which landed on Saturn’s moon Titan in January 2005 as part of NASA’s Cassini mission, and the Mars Express orbiter, which went into orbit around Mars in December 2003.

China, Japan, and India have each developed satellite launchers, but only China has put a piloted spacecraft into orbit. Japan has joined Canada, Russia, and the ESA in contributing hardware and experiments to the International Space Station. In addition, China has indicated an interest in establishing a space station that would be permanently crewed and has announced plans to send unpiloted spacecraft to the Moon.

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