For decades, American analysts had presented conflict as binary, carrying forward with varying intensity the dualistic rhetoric of the Kennedy presidency: two superpowers, two mutually exclusive economic and political systems. In this vision, conflict between the superpowers was inherent and inevitable, while cooperation was unlikely or at best untrustworthy. Even so, US–Soviet cooperation in space had early diplomatic successes, such as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the bilateral “Cooperation in Space” agreement of 1972, and the joint Apollo–Soyuz Test Project of mid-1975, when manned spacecraft of the two superpowers docked and co-orbited for two days in low Earth orbit.62 Clearly, space was not simply a sci-tech frontier but a frontier of détente as well.
During the 1980s—as Star Wars boosters and Star Wars denouncers intensified their tactics in the United States—the Soviet Union began to come apart at the seams, assailed by internal economic and political turmoil and by burgeoning non-Communist movements in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Not a good time for basic research in space science, but a fine time for military applications. In 1986, both sides of the Cold War had some terrible weeks and months. In February, the US space shuttle Challenger disintegrated just seconds after launch, killing seven crew members. In April, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine caught fire and released radioactive material into the surroundings, killing scores of workers and causing thyroid cancer in thousands of children because of contaminated milk. As William E. Burrows writes in This New Ocean, “The end of the beginning started in 1986. It was marked by two ruptures, widely thought to be technological, but whose causes ran far deeper. . . . Both made the planet wince.”63
In March 1989 the Soviet Union held an election for the newly created legislature, in which voters had a choice of candidates for the first time since 1917. Many officials of the Communist Party went down to defeat. On the evening of November 9, 1989, at a press conference broadcast live on TV, a tired East German bureaucrat blundered his way into an unexpected, half-unauthorized announcement that the Party had “decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um) to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings.” Within hours, East Berliners were dancing atop the hated Wall, smashing it with hammers, and pouring into West Berlin.64 In early December 1991, eleven of the fifteen former Soviet republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Just weeks later, on the 25th of December, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, champion of glasnost and perestroika—“openness” and “restructuring”—resigned his appointed post. The following February in Washington, DC, independent Russia’s leader, Boris Yeltsin, and America’s president, George H. W. Bush, announced that the Cold War was officially over.
Consider even a smattering of Soviet economic statistics from 1990–91, depicting a Soviet Union in collapse and a newborn Russia beset by hardship. Forty percent of the USSR’s huge 1990 grain harvest was left to rot or was devoured by vermin because of the sorry state of food processing and transportation. Factories faced crippling increases in the price of materials: the wholesale price index for industrial production rose 200 percent year over year during the first half of 1991 and kept on rising. The prices for ordinary goods and services increased by 240 percent from December 1990 to December 1991, but the incomes of ordinary people did not keep pace. Exports dropped by 33 percent in 1991. While the state paid its bills by printing more rubles, workers paid some of their bills with vodka. Aspirin, not to mention antibiotics, became rare. Life expectancy dropped.
Given the strife and privation across the USSR during Gorbachev’s later years in office, you might assume that the formidable Soviet space program would have collapsed alongside the plummeting gross national product.65 Not quite. It’s complicated.
In 1985, during Gorbachev’s first year as general secretary, writes James Clay Moltz in The Politics of Space Security, he and his advisors were fed up with “tit-for-tat military competitions,” convinced that the achievements of space exploration could “serve as an effective locomotive for the scientific and technological revolution,” and intent on breaking the military’s stranglehold on the space program. Their first step was to create the outward-looking space agency Glavkosmos, designed to market some of the Soviet Union’s impressive space services, hardware, and research to the West, thereby attracting much-needed hard currency, among other benefits. “Soviet space-related technologies now constituted one of the few areas where the USSR was on par with—and in some cases, even ahead of—world leaders,” Moltz argues.66 Among those marketable Soviet technologies were the Proton launch system and the Energiya booster rocket, capable of hoisting a hundred tons into orbit. And lest anyone forget, the list of Soviet space firsts is far longer than that of the United States. By 1985 the Soviet Union had successfully orbited six space stations in fourteen years, while America had orbited one.
In February 1986 the Soviet Union launched its long-lived space station Mir—eighth in its Salyut series but now given a new name, meaning “Peace.” Later in the year Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at a nuclear disarmament summit in Iceland, which might have succeeded but for the unshakable US commitment to Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, unbeknownst to Gorbachev at the time of the summit, the Soviet Union’s own offensive versions of Star Wars were well under way: an orbiting laser cannon, Skif, and an orbiting missile-armed battle station, Kaskad. Though displeased to learn of Skif, Gorbachev permitted a demonstration launch via Energiya in May 1987—minus the laser. The giant rocket did its part admirably, but the Skif tumbled into the North Pacific. Funding for Soviet Star Wars evaporated soon thereafter.
Once again, space moved to the frontier of détente. Civilian Soviet space officials presented proposals to the West, including a joint US–Soviet mission to Mars and a Soviet-funded international space station. By April 1987, even before the death of Skif, the future seemed to have brightened sufficiently to permit the US secretary of state and the Soviet foreign minister to sign an agreement on sixteen cooperative space-science projects, including several Mars missions.67 In early December 1988, mere months after a couple of Soviet space disasters that had been intended to showcase the USSR as a “reliable and still innovative partner,” Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the UN General Assembly. Besides announcing that his country would unilaterally reduce its armed forces and armaments, he reiterated the Soviet position that “activities in outer space must rule out the appearance of weapons there” and offered a Soviet radar station to serve as an international space facility under UN control.68 Potential space conflict cost too much and imperiled far more. The Soviet Union could no longer afford any of it.
In his engaging 1994 memoir, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, plasma physicist Roald Sagdeev, director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Space Research Institute (Institut Kosmicheskih Issledovany, IKI) from 1973 to 1988—a man whom Carl Sagan describes in the foreword as having “instituted glasnost before Gorbachev” and as “helping to forestall an acceleration of the nuclear arms race both in space and on Earth”—details the downgrading of Soviet space science. Describing the “military-industrial iceberg” and his sense that the prime national task remained the “building of a huge military machine,” he writes, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “In my space career, when I had to deal extensively with the defense industries, rockets in space were provided as a show of philanthropy from the military’s enterprises.” Secrecy and lies—“small lies for a noble cause”—were customary (not that the USSR invented the tactic) and continued into the Gorbachev era. Sagdeev does not mince words, calling the managers of his nation’s space program “the corrupt barons of the Soviet space mafia” and “men from the stone age.” Near the end of the memoir, he distinguishes between the agenda of science and the agenda of the military-industrial complex, a phrase he embraces, even using it as the title of one of his chapters:
The difference between the space science community and
the space industry community rests on the fact that while industry instinctively prefers contracts that repeat projects and models already in existence, scientists need novelty. Old mundane results have no real scientific value. Our profession by definition requires us to move on to new designs. The difference between space science and technology is, essentially, a philosophical conflict between two ways of life.
. . . The space industry had developed a special capability to survive in [an] environment [where] everything was kept under secrecy. Now they were afraid to start a new life with glasnost.69
The day Gorbachev stepped down, his adversary Yeltsin assumed power in the new Russia. Yeltsin had been demanding that all space programs be suspended for several years. First things first. The economy, already reeling, suffered more blows from aggressive privatization of both resources and industrial capacity. Add to this picture the rise of oligarchs and mobsters and breakaway republics, fights over oil development and oil pipelines, slumping oil prices, and outflows of money to Swiss banks. According to the International Monetary Fund, in 1992 Russia’s GDP dropped more than 14 percent, while prices escalated by more than 1,700 percent; in 1993 GDP declined another 9 percent, while inflation proceeded at an annual rate of nearly 900 percent. Not until 1997 did the Russian economy improve.70 In the interim, the Russian Space Agency (partnering with American firms) began to sell time on its formerly secret, top-of-the-line spy satellites. Civilian flights on MiG-29 fighter jets became available for a few thousand dollars. And in 1993, Sotheby’s in New York auctioned off two hundred pieces of the Soviet and Russian space programs, from logbooks and used space suits, to a slotted chess set designed to work in zero gravity, to a recovered burnt Soyuz capsule. That last item sold for $1.7 million. I was there. Not quite a garage sale, but the auction room smelled of victors divvying up the spoils of war—a long-fought Cold War victory. One heavy buyer was anti-Communist Texas billionaire and 1992 independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who later donated his purchases to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.71
By 1996 Russia owed Kazakhstan hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid rent for use of the main space-launch facility at Baikonur, in what had suddenly, in December 1991, become a separate country. With a 1996 space budget of $700 million, Russia was now next to last in space spending, just above India. While pleading for a pittance equal to one-twelfth of the US civil space budget, the general director of the Russian Space Agency told the Russian parliament in 1996 that almost half the space program’s engineers and technicians had left because they couldn’t survive on the average monthly salary of a hundred dollars. This had consequences. Russia’s early-warning satellite network mistook a Norwegian scientific rocket for an attack by a US sea-launched Trident missile. Russian space reconnaissance went blind for half a year because some of the short-lived spy satellites were failing and couldn’t be replaced. Yet another deep-space collaborative mission fell into the ocean, owing to the failure of Russia’s Proton rocket.
Then, writes Burrows, “it got worse. Early in 1997, time and the severely shrunken budget began to catch up with the world’s only space station, then in its eleventh year in orbit.” Mir—by now a “jury-rigged flying tool kit that had gone six years beyond its design life”—almost bit the dust. Saving money had superseded safety. Instead of getting routine maintenance, Mir’s parts were being used until they died. In 1998 GLONASS, too, began to falter, with no money to replenish the system with new satellites, as had been planned. Having carried out ten space launches in 1998, Russia’s military managed to fund only four launches in each of the next two years. As for space science, said the director of the Institute of Space Research in Moscow, “We were barely functioning.”
Corporate behemoths swooped in to offer their version of a rescue: joint ventures. Lockheed linked up with Khrunichev to market the Proton rocket; subsequent mergers and acquisitions pulled in Martin Marietta and the Energiya corporation, resulting in International Launch Services, which by 1995 had garnered 15 percent of the global commercial space-launch market. The Ukrainian design group Yuzhnoye teamed with Boeing, Energiya, and Norway’s Kvaerner Maritime Group to form the Sea Launch partnership. Pratt & Whitney in America joined with Energomash in Russia to make and service the RD-180 rocket engine, for which the main customer became the US military. The French company Arianespace, the world’s first commercial space-transportation company, joined with the Russian design bureau Starsem to market the Soyuz launcher.
The US government, too, found ways to support Russia and simultaneously serve its own national security interests. One was to funnel money through the International Space Station budget to ensure completion of the mission-crucial Russian service module. The US also paid the Russian Space Agency to fly seven American astronauts on Mir. With the crumbling of the Soviet state, the Reagan-era bugaboo of malign Soviet space stations orbiting above American cities evaporated, and the United States embraced the participation of former Soviet scientists and engineers in American space projects—anything to keep brilliant but institutionally orphaned Russians engaged in science rather than bomb-making, whether for Russia or for an adversary of the United States.72
Vladimir Putin’s accession to power on the final day of 1999 brought changes. Gradually the full constellation of twenty-four GLONASS satellites was replaced. A new but considerably over-budget space launch facility, Vostochny, was built inside the borders of the Russian Federation. Roscosmos was transformed into a state corporation following a slew of rocket failures and corruption scandals. And following the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011, Soyuz spacecraft became—and remain—the only way to transport crew of any nationality, as well as supplies, to and from the International Space Station.
Yet despite the Putin-era improvements, Russia’s space program continues to suffer overall. While Russia’s deputy prime minister for space and defense personally benefits from sales of Russian-made rocket engines for US launch vehicles, a Roscosmos engineer earns less than three hundred dollars a month. While China’s space program undertakes ever larger projects, Russia’s becomes ever more precarious. While European and Japanese astronauts conduct manifold scientific experiments in their areas of the International Space Station, Russian cosmonauts lack even a proper laboratory in theirs. Roscosmos now operates within a ten-year (2016–25) budget of about $20 billion—barely more than NASA gets each year. Cutbacks and constraints on space science are the result of ongoing low oil revenues for the Russian government, Western sanctions against supplying dual-use items to Russia, even for obviously scientific projects, and prioritization of military spending.
Collaboration opens a path out of this cul de sac, although sanctions and scarce funds still throw up roadblocks. Among the current partnerships of Russia’s Space Research Institute are ExoMars, with the European Space Agency, to undertake robotic exploration of the Martian surface and atmosphere; Venera-D, with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to develop an orbiter and lander to resume Russia’s pioneering investigations of Venus that date back to 1961; and the Spektr-RG orbital X-ray observatory, with the German Space Agency, DLR, to perform a wide-angle survey of large-scale structures of the universe, including a hundred thousand galaxy clusters.73
Between 2013 and 2016, the annual Russian government space budget dropped by two-thirds, from just under $5 billion to $1.6 billion. Russia provided more than half the resupply missions to the International Space Station and all of the crew transportation in 2015, but the bad news is that two of its launches failed that year and fifteen failed between 2011 and the end of 2016. Fortunately, none were crewed capsules. But space experts are retiring, available labor doesn’t always meet earlier standards, and quality control is waning. Evidently, one of the two original space superpowers has been sidelined, at least for now.74 Instead, mastery of near-Earth and underwater nuclear-powered weapons—superpowerful, invincible, maneuverable missiles capable of unlimited range—has become Russia’s trump card, a
s Putin declared in his 2018 state of the nation address:
We talked about missiles that are capable of bypassing, avoiding, defensive barriers. We made no secret of our plans. We spoke openly of what we were about to do. We wanted to motivate our counterparts. This was in 2004. . . . Russia is a major nuclear power, but nobody wanted to talk to us seriously. They kept ignoring us. Nobody listened to us. So, listen to us now.75
The International Space Station—a massive, solar-powered orbiting habitat and laboratory that today involves fifteen countries, represented by the space agencies of Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States, as well as support from commercial ventures—is humanity’s quintessential space collaboration of the early twenty-first century. Its current primary purpose is neither astrophysical nor aggressive. Mostly it serves as a technological, physiological, psychological, sociological, and even agricultural trial run for human survival in deep space. Challenges faced by the rigorously trained inhabitants during the weeks and months they pass within its confines help show what is, and is not, possible in the nonterrestrial future of our species. Surely the capacity to live and work off-planet long-term would, for Homo sapiens, be the ultimate in space power.
Announced as a goal by Ronald Reagan in 1984, this sprawling vessel has had quite a history. The foremost triumph is that the ISS—all 460 tons of it, gradually assembled in low Earth orbit—actually exists and functions. But of course, struggles have accompanied that triumph.
For instance, the US Department of Defense, still fighting the Cold War and wary of international participation, inserted itself early in the negotiating phase of what had been billed as a civilian endeavor for peaceful purposes. In December 1986, DoD suddenly demanded assurances that the military would be able to do national security work on the station, unvetted by other nations, and that any notion of equal partnership would not “displace either the reality or symbol of U.S. leadership.”76
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