However, nothing could happen in the body without Kremlin approval. Blagonravov, the Soviet Union’s representative for negotiating multilateral space science cooperation agreements, became the group’s first appointed vice president.
This arrangement opened an opportunity for dialogue and informal contacts between American and Soviet space officials. In the scientific community, the role of an international space science union was assumed by the Committee on Space Research, with its unusual charter giving a mandate to both superpowers to appoint vice presidents. This eventually led to the Outer Space Treaty and creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which a reluctant Soviet Union eventually joined. Meanwhile, the United States energetically proceeded with its multinational initiative under the umbrella of the United Nations to develop a legal framework for peaceful space activities. This would be the first of many times when space was linked with nuclear disarmament and other political issues. Feeling triumphant after Sputnik’s launch, Khrushchev was certain his country was far ahead of the United States in terms of rocket technology and space launch capabilities, unlike the Soviet Union’s more vulnerable geostrategic position in the nuclear arena. Khrushchev, however, rejected the offer and demanded the United States eliminate its forward-based nuclear weapons in places like Turkey as a precondition for any space agreement. Eisenhower suggested creating a process to secure space for peaceful uses.
THE FIRST MAN ON THE MOON WAS HUGH GRANT HOPE SERIES
Eisenhower pursued U.S.-Soviet cooperative space initiatives through a series of letters he sent in 19 to the Soviet leadership, first to Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and then to Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
government decided to make NASA a purely civilian enterprise, while focusing its military space efforts in the Pentagon and intelligence community.Įarly on, President Dwight D. After reaping the first political dividends from military rocket technology, the Soviets continued to pursue a highly classified military-industrial approach in developing its space program. Sputnik’s launch had dramatic repercussions for the Cold War rivals. 4, 1957, a seemingly routine test launch of a Soviet ICBM (now known as the R-7 rocket) carried the first artificial satellite to orbit. To highlight the effort, organizers had urged the United States and the Soviet Union to consider launching a scientific satellite. In 1957, the International Geophysical Year was launched, a multinational effort to study Earth on a comprehensive, coordinated basis. By the mid-1950s, they were ready to test their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). From the end of World War II, the Soviets made rockets their most important military asset. The birth of the Space Age following the Soviet launch of Sputnik came out of the confluence of two seemingly incompatible developments. Throughout this political roller-coaster period of history, both countries increased areas of coop-eration, including space, as a symbol of warmer relations while cutting cooperation off when ties worsened. Periods of détente, in contrast, led to the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in 1963, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972, and an emerging U.S.-Soviet rapprochement during 1985-1991. relationship in the years between 19 often was characterized by periods of mistrust and overt hostility (e.g., the U-2 incident, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”). As the Soviet Union neared collapse, with its ideological underpinnings evaporating, the impetus for the arms race and competition in space declined, allowing both countries to seriously pursue strategic partnerships in space. Only in the late 1980s, with warming political relations, did momentum for major space cooperation begin to build. At first, this charged political environment accommodated nothing more than symbolic gestures of collaboration.
Both countries gave primary emphasis in their space efforts to a combination of national security and foreign policy objectives, turning space into an area of active competition for political and military advantage. The Space Age spawned two outstanding space programs as a result of the hot competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower’s granddaughter) that traces the long, hard path to space cooperation until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. He wrote this essay with his wife, Susan Eisenhower (President Dwight D. Sagdeev, the former head of the Russian Space Research Institute, now is the director of the University of Maryland’s East-West Space Science Center. Sagdeev spent a large part of his career viewing NASA from the Soviet Union’s side of the Cold War divide. By Roald Sagdeev, University of Maryland, and Susan Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Institute
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