In a bar a crowd glower at a TV and drink in silence. On the screen, grainy black and white footage shows a man descending the ladder of his lunar module on to the surface of the Moon. He steps down to the surface, plants his nations flag, and says “I take this step for my country, for my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life…”. It is 1969 and the Soviets have beaten the Americans to land a man on the Moon.
This is the opening of Apple TVs alternate history show For All Mankind, which depicts the United States unexpectedly losing the Moon race and being stirred into action to restore their status at the technological leader of the world. Subsequently the Apollo program continues and the series follows a human expansion into the solar system from the 1970s into the 21st century, driven by superpower competition. In the real world, we never got to see this happen. Apollo abruptly ended, the Soviet lunar program failed, and no human has gone more than a few hundred kilometres from the Earth’s surface since 1972.
The space race that had begun with the upset of Sputnik ended instead with the use of valuable space hardware for, primarily, a publicity stunt that mostly benefited a dictatorship.
The Road To Apollo-Soyuz
Initial post-Apollo plans were ambitious; the hardware developed for the Moon landings would be used for increasingly long stays on the lunar surface, as well as to operate multiple workshops in Earth orbit, and even attempt a flyby of Venus. Together, these plans formed the Apollo Applications Program.
In January 1967 NASA was campaigning for the funds to do this, they were also preparing to launch their first Apollo capsule. When a fire engulfed the vehicle during a test on the launchpad, killing 3 astronauts. While the Moon landing was more or less locked in at this point, the scandal that followed the tragedy killed any appetite for Apollo Applications funding.
The program was descoped to only use whatever Apollo hardware had already been ordered, but which was not already earmarked for the Moon landings. Out of this came the Skylab program, but none of the other ambitious projects. Americas human spaceflight program was on a downward trajectory before the first man had even set foot on the Moon.
After Skylab, one final Apollo flight would take place in 1975, to dock with a Soviet Soyuz capsule, stage a handshake between astronauts and cosmonauts for the press, exchange gifts, and conduct some experiments to try and justify the mission on scientific grounds. It’s real purpose was entwined in the context of an increasingly expensive superpower competition.
The Treaties
Beginning with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the superpowers begin to diplomatically wind down the space race. This was, primarily, and arms control treaty which was driven on the US side by fears of Soviet weapons of mass destruction in space. But it contained provisions as well that precluded any territorial claims in space.
Signing the treaty, President Johnson remarked
This treaty means that the moon and our sister planets will serve only the purposes of peace and not of war. It means that orbiting man-made satellites will remain free of nuclear weapons. It means that astronaut and cosmonaut will meet someday on the surface of the moon as brothers and not as warriors for competing nationalities or ideologies.
At this time, both sides likely understood what the outcome of the Moon race would be, due to underfunding and slow progress on the Soviet side, and so this was a reassurance to the USSR that the loss of the Moon would not be strategically consequential for them.
Once the landing was accomplished, things cooled off even more. By 1972, in the context of “Detente”, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Kosygin signed the Agreement Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space. This had several points which set up bilateral cooperation between scientific institutes, and in addition Article 3 of the agreement committed to a joint US-Soviet mission in 1975.
There was some consideration of docking a Salyut station to the second, unflown, Skylab station, but it would have been a technical challenge, and at this point budgets were falling with what remained being funneled towards the Shuttle. The final stripped down form of the mission was a simple docking of the final flown Apollo capsule with a Soyuz capsule, mediated by an airlock due to the different atmospheres of the two vehicles (Apollo used a lower pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere, whereas Soyuz used ordinary sea level air).
The mission flew after the last expedition to Skylab. That laboratory could have had an extra flight, which might have kept it aloft long enough to be met by the Shuttle, but a diplomatic mission was deemed more important. It was supposed to be followed up with more: the 1972 agreement was renewed in 1977, with some planning done around having a Shuttle mission visit a Salyut station - but soon the Soviets demonstrated what sort of regime they were with the invasion of Afghanistan, and such cooperation was quietly abandoned.
The Demise of the N-1
While the Americans were expending the last of their Apollo hardware in a dubious manner, in the USSR the secretive lunar program was being wound down.
The ill-fated Soviet counterpart to the Saturn V, the N-1, flew only four times, and each time it failed before its first stage burn completed. The second flight, only weeks before Apollo 11, lost thrust mere seconds after launch and fell back on to the pad, destroying it in a large explosion. There were two more flights, in 1971 and 1972, and the second of these almost reached staging. It was a troubled and expensive program, but two completed rockets with upgraded engines were ready for testing in 1974 when the entire program was shelved.
The 70s lull in American spaceflight had given the Soviets much needed breathing room, and pulled the rug out from under their own internal advocates. At the time, there had been internal lobbying for a mission dubbed “L3M”, which instead of attempting an Apollo-style landing with a single N-1 would use two N-1s to launch first a “crasher stage” into lunar orbit, and then sending the crew on a combined lander and return capsule to rendezvous with the crasher stage. This stage would provide most of the thrust to get down to the lunar surface, before detaching and crashing (hence the name) and the lander would use its own engines to complete the last part of landing. This approach would leave it with enough propellant to return to Earth via a direct ascent. Not having a command module on orbit meant long duration missions were more viable, and the lander being able to abort directly to Earth at any point increased safety.
But the interest from the Soviet leadership to this idea was lukewarm. Yes, they could upstage the Americans with more complex lunar missions and potentially a base, but what was the propaganda value, if the US public had decided that the Moon was too dull to bother with? The program never got significant funding and died alongside the rocket that was to launch it. In its wake was an ill-advised attempt to copy the Shuttle, and the USSR never made any attempts at beyond Earth orbit human missions again.
Steel Sharpens Steel
The powerful, most of all, wish to retain power. To this end they are motivated to bribe those beneath them to accept the power structure as is. The problem is that these bribes become increasingly expensive as the people expect their lives to improve over time. In the 1970s both the US and USSR were facing economic stagnation and looking to remove expenses from their respective budgets in order to focus more on domestic spending.
It was convenient then to wind down the space race for both sides. But it was to the detriment to the peoples of those countries who, despite being bought off in the near term, would suffer long term a lack of progress. Nations and systems being insufficiently tested allows dysfunctional ones to persist for longer. How much quicker would the Soviet Union and its satellites have collapsed if they had been forced to continue spending money on a permanent Moon base?
Fast forward to today, and there seems to be a nascent space race between the US and China - both attempting to send humans to the south pole of the Moon around the same time. Such competition should be encouraged for multiple reasons - it is preferable to direct conflict, and will stress test the two nations systems. It is better for Americans, for Chinese people, and for the rest of the world that this happens, as it will force concessions from leadership. Scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers will be able to leverage the national interest in order to gain support for - or eliminate opposition to - projects that would otherwise not get off the ground. Some of these projects will fail, others will have to change over time, but the net effect will be the technological advancement of society. The only other situation this kind of acceleration tends to happen in is outright war, and nonviolent national competition is clearly far preferable to that.
Don’t be seduced by talk of international cooperation. Elites will collude with each other against their people for their own narrow, short term interests. Make nations, and system, and leaders work for their legitimacy instead.
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You can draw an analogy with companies - where competition means harder work, but ultimately benefits the consumer
How do you think US leaders could have convincingly justified space spending after they'd beaten the Soviets to the Moon?
Political bragging rights or fabulous profits: those seem to be the two motivators!