Another Cold War, another space race — and another chance for cooperation 

In the aftermath of the Biden-Xi summit, we should consider a comparable moment 50 years ago during the height of superpower confrontation, when the issue of outer space cooperation was considered. We don’t need to look far to find a comparison between 1973s and 2023s cold wars. 

Recently, Belarus announced it was joining the Chinese/Russian-led International Lunar Research Station program, joining Pakistan, South Africa, Venezuela and a small but growing group of countries (seven total). Two weeks later, Bulgaria announced it was joining the U.S.-led lunar project, the Artemis Accords, joining a group of 32 countries, including Japan, India, Brazil, Argentina, the UK, Germany and Canada. Estimates vary, but as of now, it is difficult to predict whether the U.S.-led or the China/Russia-led groups will put humans on the Moon first.

It’s easy to see parallels with the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s and ’70s: A cold war with two superpowers competing for the influence of surpassing the other in space. (Full disclosure: After working in the State Department, I spent several years in strategic business planning for COMSAT, most of which took place during the Cold War.) 

In an important sense, outer space has always been as much about geopolitics as science or commerce. The Soviets surpassing the U.S. with the first satellite in space (Sputnik), the first dog and human in space and the first space station was more about geopolitics than science, as was America surpassing the Soviets with the first human on the Moon.  

But an enormous amount has changed since the 1970s in space technology, economics, commerce and international involvements.

Today, people worldwide rely on satellites for navigation; photos of streets, farms, rivers, ice, traffic, etc.; television; streaming video; Internet access; weather forecasts; and satellite-cellphone service. Instead of space being something that involves a few politicians, scientists and soldiers, space today has been democratized and is internationally dominated by many government agencies, businesses and nonprofits/universities.  

Initially, the international democratization of commercial space was stimulated by organizations that were designed to internationalize commercial space, such as INTELSAT and INMARSAT. More recently, drastically lower launch, manufacturing and maintenance costs have led to a global explosion in investor-owned, commercial satellite ventures. Similarly, because of greatly lower costs, satellites today are an integral part of every nation’s military operations. Military uses of space include rocket-based weapons, navigation, intelligence, communications and much more, leading to both the embedding of space technologies into every military unit and to the creation of distinct space military units.   

Even the scientific exploration of space has dramatically changed, due primarily to the economic democratization of space. At today’s cost of deploying a satellite, dozens of nations and hundreds of private scientific organizations from many countries now develop and operate satellites and science-oriented space projects. This international democratization of scientific space was initially stimulated by such international space organizations as the International Space Station and the European Space Agency, but has recently grown very far beyond both.   

So, any discussion of lessons we might learn from the original to today’s Space Race begins by recognizing the vast changes in technology, economics, market penetration, international involvement, usage and public attitudes between the 1970s and the 2020s. Nonetheless, geopolitics remains a major driver of scientific, military and commercial space activities today, just as it was 50 years ago, and we should consider lessons from that time as we seek to manage an era of U.S.-Chinese confrontation and cooperation. 

By any measure, 1972 was a peak year of the Cold War: the Vietnam War was in full force; Richard Nixon played his “China Card” by visiting China; Libya and Chile re-aligned toward the USSR while Egypt re-aligned toward the U.S.; and proxy wars between the two superpowers proliferated throughout Africa. Both sides had allies, friends, proxies, space accomplishments, extensive intelligence operations and propaganda machines. And both were led by hard-nosed leaders determined to give few concessions to the other side. Moreover, each side’s scientific space program was highly visible but intimately linked to its military.  

And yet, in July of 1972, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin — both famous hardliners against the other side — signed what became known as the Appolo-Soyuz agreement to open the door to space scientific cooperation and, famously, provide for the US Apollo spacecraft to dock with the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. Many on each side, including The New York Times reacted negatively to such cooperation, fearing that the other side would manipulate the cooperation to steal technology.  

In July of 1975, in one of the most highly publicized space ventures of all time, America’s manned Apollo spacecraft docked with the Soviet’s manned Soyuz spacecraft and the five astronauts/cosmonauts spent 44 hours before a worldwide television audience shaking hands and conducting experiments. Apollo-Soyuz was less a scientific achievement than it was a lesson that even during the depths of Cold War confrontation, targeted cooperation in outer space can exist. 

Both Nixon and his foreign policy guru, Henry Kissinger, and Kosygin and his Politburo colleagues were clearly trying to send a signal to their allies, militaries, supporters and publics that carefully tailored, highly visible outer space cooperation during the height of geopolitical confrontation was possible, and that geopolitical confrontation need not necessarily lead to unrestrained war. Today, although the Biden administration seeks to similarly carve out “climate change” as a topic of Sino-U.S. cooperation, “climate change” includes so many domestic and international economic and political crosscurrents that even the appearance of cooperation is extremely complex.  

Space science cooperation has many advantages: its non-political/scientific basis, its high visibility, its comparative simplicity, and its heritage of adversaries cooperating. A 2023-style Apollo-Soyuz venture should be favorably considered, notwithstanding the Wolf Amendment, as a means to show the world that geopolitical confrontation need not necessarily lead to unrestrained war — just as it did in 1972.   

Roger Cochetti has served as a senior executive with COMSAT, IBM, VeriSign and CompTIA. A former U.S. government official, he has helped found a number of nonprofits in the tech sector and is the author of textbooks on the history of satellite communications.