Henry Kissinger and the birth of space diplomacy

Henry Kissinger, former national security advisor and secretary of State, recently died at the age of 100 years. He was famous for the opening of mainland China, the Paris Peace Accords that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War and the negotiated end of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and several Arab states. 

Admired by some, reviled by others, he bestrode the last third of the 20th century like a colossus where foreign policy was concerned.

Kissinger also had a role in creating space exploration as a tool of diplomacy. The strategy fit neatly into the policy of détente that he and President Richard Nixon devised to manage the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kissinger’s effort to make space exploration an instrument of diplomacy was not the first attempt. President John F. Kennedy proposed transforming the Apollo race to the moon into a joint American-Soviet effort. Kennedy’s gambit went nowhere. Kissinger’s, on the other hand, led to real-world results.

Nixon came to office inheriting the Apollo program, started by President John F. Kennedy and nurtured by President Lyndon Johnson. The Apollo 11 moon landing, the greatest technological feat in the history of humankind, happened on Nixon’s watch. The race to the moon had been won. But what should come next?

Kissinger was instrumental in arranging the world tour by the Apollo 11 astronauts as a way to showcase American democracy, freedom and technological prowess. The tour was a way to rub the triumphant American race to the moon in the Soviets’ noses. Having done that, Nixon and Kissinger decided to pivot and reach out to the Soviet Union to form a space partnership.

The first tentative move toward a joint American-Soviet space program took place as a result of a memo Kissinger wrote to various government officials, including the secretary of state and the NASA administrator. The 1970 memo read, in part, “The [p]resident has decided that space cooperation with the Soviet Union should be pursued simultaneously through high-level diplomatic and technical agency channels.”

To make a long story short, those discussions bore fruit. During a 1972 summit meeting, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin signed the Agreement Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes that set the launch of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) for 1975.

In the middle of July 1975, with Gerald Ford then president, the ASTP mission was launched. The Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in low Earth orbit. The famous televised handshake took place between NASA astronaut Tom Stafford and Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The combined spacecraft conducted numerous experiments before separating and returning to Earth.

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project might have led to other joint American-Soviet space missions. However, as Sean Van Buskirk pointed out in a paper on the ASTP, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union took a turn for the worse in the later 70s, partly due to President Jimmy Carter’s displeasure with the Kremlin’s human rights practices. The election of Ronald Reagan, who had vowed to bring down the USSR, didn’t help matters.

NASA remained an instrument of international diplomacy. Numerous foreign astronauts flew on space shuttle missions. When President Reagan first announced the creation of a crewed space station, Canada, the European Space Agency and Japan were partners in its construction and operation.

Space diplomacy with the Russians did not reoccur until the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton made the Russian Federation, the main successor state of the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War, a partner in the International Space Station. That partnership, despite tensions between Russia and the West due to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, endures to this day.

The full flowering of space diplomacy occurred when Mike Gold, then an associate administrator at NASA, started the Artemis Accords. Signatories agreed to abide by several rules when operating on celestial bodies such as the moon and Mars. Currently, 33 nations have signed the accords, the latest being the African country of Angola.

By the time the Artemis Accords had started, Kissinger had retired to become an éminence grise, still writing books and giving advice. He never publicly expressed an opinion about the accords. But considering his early work, one suspects that Kissinger would have approved of them as yet another example of using space exploration as an instrument of diplomacy.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.