With such a slim margin for error, rigorous tests must be carried out before sending a manned crew into orbit. Fears over the rockets’ safety are confirmed with the launch of the second test rocket, Kosmos 57, which receives an unauthorised radio signal from a launch station, causing the engine to fire up prematurely, and the craft to become destabilised, eventually spinning out of control and burning up. 

On the 12th October 1964, Voskhod 1 is launched. Korolev wishes to test how people of different backgrounds work together in the stressful and alien conditions of space flight. Thus, two of the cosmonauts are civilians: Konstantin Feoktistov is a flight engineer who worked Vostok programme and Boris Yegorov is a physician. Together with Vladimir Komarov, they begin the first space flight containing more than one cosmonaut.  

This is a highly dangerous mission, and to save mass, the crew are not equipped with ejector seats, an escape system or space suits. Fortunately, it is a success, and trio stay in space for just over an hour. During this time, Yegorov conducts tests on his fellow cosmonauts’ heart and pulse rates, muscle coordination, brainwaves and blood, in an attempt to understand the effects of space travel on human physiology. The cosmonauts are eager to stay in orbit, and though Korolev is tempted to allow them to continue their mission, eventually they are called down to Earth, where they land safely.

The final Voskhod mission is launched in March 1965 with the aim of performing humanity’s first spacewalk – where a cosmonaut would exit his craft and float in the vacuum of space. Two men, Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, join the mission. After 90 minutes, Leonov enters the craft’s inflatable airlock and begins the spacewalk. Later, he would describe the magical feeling of floating in space where he ‘felt like a seagull with its wings outstretched, soaring high above the world’.

In keeping with Soviet secrecy, no one, not even the cosmonauts’ immediate family, knew about the spacewalk ahead of time. Leonov, in an article he wrote decades later, remembers his wife telling him of his father’s furious reaction to the stunt as he watched it live back on Earth.

“Why is he acting like a juvenile delinquent?” he shouted at the TV, “everyone else can complete their mission properly, inside the spacecraft. What is he doing clambering about outside? Somebody must tell him to get back inside immediately. He must be punished for this.”

Mr. Leonov is right to be worried. As his son finished his 12-minute spacewalk, he realises that, as there is no atmospheric pressure, the oxygen in his spacesuit has caused it to stiffen, making it impossible to re-enter the airlock. With just a few minutes of life support remaining, Leonov must think quickly. He realises that the only way to re-enter is to gradually let oxygen out of his spacesuit, making it looser and more pliable. Leonov painstakingly lets oxygen out of its valve, saving himself by jettisoning the very thing keeping him alive. Luckily, it works, and little by little, he squeezes himself back into the airlock. Then, like a contortionist, he must curl himself into a ball, spin around (an almost impossible manoeuvre in such a tight space) and seal its doors shut. 

The craft itself barely makes it back to Earth. The cosmonauts miss their intended landing site by over 200 miles (321 km), touching down in the middle of a forest in the Ural Mountains. Leonov suffers from a severe heatstroke, but is alive. The pair sit underneath the towering Siberian pines waiting to be picked up by their comrades.

The live transmission was cut by the Soviet authorities as soon as it looked like Leonov was in difficulty, and none would know of the cosmonaut’s near-death experience until years later. What was known as Leonov and Belyayev arrived safely back in Moscow, however, was that a human being could survive in space without suffering hallucinations, exhaustion or losing consciousness. This is a discovery with wide-ranging implications, and the Voskhod flights proved invaluable for mankind’s understanding of the science and practicalities of space travel, proving that longer-term space travel, such as that needed to travel to the Moon, was possible.

Måndag morgon och man vaknar till detta i maillådan!

The Soviet reaction to Kennedy’s ‘To the Moon’ speech is muted, and their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, at first declines to comment.  After all, the Soviets are naturally reluctant to play the Space Race on US terms; the nation, for example, never publicly states a desire to travel to the Moon. The Soviets instead focus on their own priorities – rocket technology and space flight.

In June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova takes off in the Vostok 6 rocket and becomes the first woman in space. Communists regard gender equality as a fundamental part of the liberation of the working class. The Soviets took this seriously, enshrining gender equality in their constitution way back in 1918, at a time when even a woman’s right to vote was seen as a radical idea in most of the Western world. Tereshkova’s solo mission is therefore a symbolic fulfilment of one of the USSR’s core aims – the liberation of women from rigid gender roles.

It is also a great propaganda victory over the Americans. In the 1960s, the US was beset with a series of social problems, especially racial discrimination and gender inequality. Women’s dreams went unrealised, many were condemned to a life of domestic drudgery, and those who did enter the workforce battled a culture of sexism, patronising paternalist attitudes and sexual harassment (though let’s not take the Soviet argument too literally here, as whilst sexism was societally taboo, many Soviet women were still expected to fulfill their traditional role as homemakers as well as working).

Additionally, Mercury 13, a group of privately trained female astronauts who had demonstrated their competence numerous times, were denied entry into NASA’s space programme simply due to their gender. With Tereshkova’s flight, the USSR undercuts the USA’s claim to be a nation that values freedom and self-actualisation, showing the rest of the world that, if you’re a woman and you have big dreams, perhaps it’s better to be a Soviet than an American. 

The Soviets continue their lead in rocket technology and space flight. But then, as autumn approaches, Kennedy does the unimaginable: he extends a hand out to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. He proposes that the US and the USSR work together and establish a joint lunar programme. Americans and Soviets will explore the stars hand in hand, working to achieve the loftiest goal in humanity’s history.

Kennedy’s proposal is made in a climate of relaxing tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviets placed nuclear missiles on nearby Cuba and the world came a hair’s-breadth from annihilation. Diplomacy, not war, averts disaster, and afterwards a partial nuclear test ban treaty is agreed, banning all nuclear tests apart from underground. Additionally, a hotline between the Soviet General Secretary and the American President is established, allowing the leaders of the two superpowers direct communication for the first time.

This is one of history’s great what-ifs. Perhaps this was the first step in the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the bloody and destructive American foreign policy of anticommunism would ramp down, and the Vietnam War would come to an early end. Perhaps, without a seemingly all-powerful enemy, the paranoid and totalitarian Soviet system would open up and allow its citizens the space, freedom and trust to question their leaders.  

We will never know. JFK is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, just a month after the proposal. Lee Harvey-Oswald’s bullet cuts short not just a good man’s life, but also any hope of a collaborative lunar project and a softening of US-Soviet relations. Now, Lyndon B. Johnson, bullish and aggressive, enters the White House. He will pursue a harder line against the USSR, intensify the US’s war against the Vietnamese communists and continue the Space Race as a zero-sum ideological battle.

Redan efter första dagens steg, fick vi vårt första vykort.

JFK’s speech is greeted with great acclaim in the press. It is an inspiring and hopeful message that expresses all the best intentions and goals of space exploration. It’s worth reproducing some of it in full, as it speaks for itself:

“I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. 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; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too”.

Exploration for exploration’s sake, scientific advancement not in the pursuit of power or dominance, but to discover and explore the universe. It is a speech that recognises that unique and noble impulse of humans – to leave comforts, prejudices and preconceptions behind and, in the name of curiosity, explore the unknown. Kennedy, in even stronger terms than Eisenhower in his 1958 speech, establishes a vision for a Space Race that moves further from its military origins.

Of course, not everyone is energised by this rousing paean to science and progress. The American political right dismisses the idea out of hand. Former President Dwight Eisenhower, worried as usual about the nation’s purse strings, calls the idea of spending all these tax dollars on going to the Moon ‘nuts’, and Senator Barry Goldwater, Kennedy’s Republican rival, criticises the prioritisation of a civilian space programme, claiming it would leave the US vulnerable to the still-mounting Soviet military advances.

Yet Kennedy’s speech comes in a time of national (and for the President, likely personal) self-doubt. The Soviets seem to be miles ahead in space-faring technology, having beaten the Americans in almost every endeavour, from satellites to Lunar exploration to space flight. Worse, a year prior, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when the Soviet-aligned revolutionary government in Cuba repelled a secret US-backed invasion, caused a grave national humiliation. The US at the time needed a reason to believe in itself. Kennedy does this by appealing to the best of American self-conceptions, the nation’s idea of itself as a pioneering people, as innovators and dreamers, boundary-pushers and trailblazers. Americans, as freedom lovers, are not compelled to go to space by a totalitarian government, nor are they forced into the endeavour by the need to compete with a powerful rival – no, they choose to go to the Moon for the sake of their own curiosity, their own humanity.

Då var vi på väg, Gabriel och jag, mot månen.