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.