Does a New Cold War Mean a New Space Race?

The brewing conflict between Russian and Ukraine has already led to predictions that we're on the cusp of a new Cold War. If the tensions aren't settled, there are bound to be economic and political impacts felt around the world. But what about off-world?

As James Oberg explained at NBC News, growing political strife between Russia and the West could put US missions to the International Space Station at risk, as NASA has relied on Russian rockets to get astronauts into orbit ever since the Space Shuttle was mothballed. It won't remain that way forever: SpaceX has a growing role in spaceflight operations, and NASA does have a massive new rocket in its future.

But considering the first space race came during the original Cold War, what would a second showdown between Russia and the West mean for the future of space exploration?

For one, the Cold War spurred innovation that kicked the space age into high gear. At the same time, America’s Cold War-era spaceflight decisions left the country in its current position of relying on Russia for rides to space, something that could become impossible should political tensions persist. In either case, it's clear that while there may be scientific endeavors free from political considerations, spaceflight is typically not one of them.

It’s easy to look back at the Apollo era and see the advent of spaceflight and missions to the Moon as the beginning of our natural extension into the cosmos. But it wasn’t that poetic.

The end of the Second World War brought to the fore an ideological conflict between the Eastern Soviet bloc and the American-dominated Western world. But some endeavors bridged that gap, like the International Geophysical Year. Corresponding to a period of high solar activity from July 1957 to December 1958, 67 countries ultimately participated by taking corresponding observations of geophysical phenomena. As part of their IGY contributions, both the United States and the Soviet Union promised to launch satellites.

So when the Soviets launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, it wasn’t entirely a surprise, but it did catch American scientists off guard as they'd not anticipated being beaten to orbit. But the true shock came with the launch of Sputnik 2 a month later. Featuring a rudimentary life support system for its passenger, the dog Laika, Sputnik 2 made it clear that manned flights were next on the Soviet agenda.

One of the main goals of the Sputnik launches was to show off the technological prowess of the Soviet Union, which forced the US to respond by redoubling its efforts to launch payloads into orbit. NASA was created just shy of a year after Sputnik’s launch, and while aeronautics and astronomical pursuits were all part of NASA's mission, its main goal was to get an American in space before the Soviets launched a cosmonaut of their own.

NASA’s man-in-space effort begat the Mercury program, which reflected the hurried nature of the space agency’s formation. Managers selected the simplest means to the end: blunt capsules falling from orbit to splashdown landings on the yielding ocean could be built and launched faster than a more sophisticated spacecraft design. Mercury ended up as what we can call a crash program, and was designed for a specific purpose with few, if any, applications beyond its man-in-orbit goal. It was a dead end.

Yet all the rushing, Mercury didn’t beat the Soviets into orbit. Yuri Gagarin became the first man to circle the globe on April 14, 1961; John Glenn followed on February 20, 1962.

Gagarin’s flight was another blow to America’s technological leadership, and the country responded with another crash program to regain the upper hand in space. Engineers and managers had been thinking about a manned mission to the Moon since 1959. In 1961, the decision was made to fast track the lunar program. Like Mercury, Apollo took the simplest means to the end, trading immediacy for the development of a long-term spaceflight platform.

The beginning of the end of Apollo came in 1969 when budget cuts forced cancelation of the last lunar landing mission; that no Apollo hardware was reusable meant continuing to launch these missions was prohibitively expensive. Two more missions were canceled in short order.

The budget realities of spaceflight led to a major change in the politics of the space race: Instead of competing, sharing resources became a more attractive idea. Leftover hardware from the Apollo era was transferred and applied to the short-lived Skylab program and then the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the latter of which marked the first cooperative spaceflight program.

The seeds for Apollo-Soyuz were sown in October 1970, when a group of congressmen asked President Nixon to explore cooperation with the Soviets. The mission took shape over the following two years, finally emerging in 1975 as a technical investigation into to two nations’ ability to rendezvous and dock their respective vehicles in orbit.

Many engineers and managers were already looking down the line to a cooperative space station project, but this was still a ways off. Not until 1984 did President Reagan green light the International Space Station, and the first module wasn’t launched until 1998.

NASA’s background project while the Apollo-Soyuz mission was developed and flew was to revise its spacecraft. The shuttle, properly known as the Space Transportation System, was devised as a way to ferry astronauts to and from an orbital space station. The new vehicle was greenlit by President Nixon in 1972, though he didn’t approve the corresponding station.

The shuttle was supposed to make spaceflight routine and cost-effective. The spacecraft’s payload bay dimensions were set by the Department of Defense; it agreed to help cover the program’s cost if NASA launched DOD satellites. The shuttle’s shape was honed to give it a 200 mile cross range capability, something it needed to return to a landing site on America’s west coast after a single orbit mission. It was also reusable, as were parts of its external launch system, which meant a short turnaround time between launches. It was originally expected to fly somewhere around 50 missions per year.

NASA’s hopes for the shuttle were never realized. Over its 30 year active lifetime, the shuttle flew just 135 missions. It also proved to be far more expensive per launch than anticipated, averaging about $450 million per launch. In an effort to refocus NASA’s efforts away from low Earth orbit missions and onto deep space flight, the Bush Administration canceled the shuttle program in 2004, and the final mission flew in 2011. Since then—and until private companies complete ISS mission testing—NASA has had only one way into space: Russia.

After reinventing its spacecraft only to find that it wasn’t the frequent flying, cost-effective dream vehicle it planned on, NASA is now buying seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get its astronauts to the ISS. The Soyuz, it’s worth noting, has been Russia’s workhorse since its debut in 1967 (though it has been updated since that fateful flight).

So if this conflict in the Ukraine does spark a new Cold War that in turn strains international relations such that NASA, being a government agency, can’t launch its astronauts abroad Soyuz spacecraft, American astronauts may be all suited up with no where to go. (Russia also relies on NASA support to keep the ISS going, so such an outcome is unlikely.)

Should it happen, the agency would have two options. Perhaps the most obvious is SpaceX, the commercial partner that has yet to certify its Dragon spacecraft for manned flight, though its well on its way to reaching this point. Alternatively, NASA could throw more money and energy into its own Orion/Space Launch System program in an effort to stay on track to seeing manned missions launch within the decade. China isn’t an option for American astronauts; political differences prevent NASA from working with the nation on just about anything, including the ISS program, although even that could change.

If a new Cold War emerges, the chances are slim that it will spur the United States to devote more financial resources to NASA in the name of regaining the technological upper hand. Ultimately, NASA has already won the Space Race. America is the only nation to have sent men to the Moon, and has launched most of the spacecraft currently exploring the inner and outer reaches of the solar system.

It might take more than another Cold War to spur the same kind of funding for spaceflight we saw in the 1960s, like some larger threat that could only be solved with a huge increase in funding for space activities. An asteroid, perhaps?