Special to CosmicTribune.com, July 23, 2025

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

The myth that Peace-in-Space can lead to, or even influence the possibility of Peace-on-Earth rests in part on the historically brief but emotionally enduring impact of the first international mission in space, the July 17, 1975 docking of the United States-Soviet Union Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

While nostalgia for this event likely will survive well beyond its recent 50th anniversary, the cold historic fact is that this brief act of peace-in-space did not influence the Soviet Union to abandon its political goals on Earth or to abandon its many programs to build and deploy devastating weapons in space.

For example, soon after the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union began developing its Polyus/Skif-DM, a 1-megawatt chemical space laser combat satellite whose May 15, 1987 launch ended in failure.

Such a weapon, had it been successful, would surely have been followed by more powerful variants with the ability to attack targets on Earth.

In its history that it published in 1996 (perhaps an attempt to generate post-Soviet funding) the Energia Corporation revealed that it had been developing a combat-capable version of its then famous MIR space station, docking Earth-bombers based on the fuselages of its Buran spaceplane.

These projects were halted only by monumental political change on Earth: the 1990-1991 collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the terrestrial political force propelling Soviet military ambitions on Earth and in space.

And perhaps the more realistic if less appealing lesson is that no amount of Peace-in-Space can alter diehard Earth-bound political trajectories, to include the post-Soviet Russian and Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) hegemonic ambitions on Earth which they both seek to reinforce by building space combat power and by imposing their hegemony over the Earth-Moon System.

But on this 50th anniversary nostalgia-driven hope endures largely because the democracies survived the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, thereby sustaining the ability of space workers, space experts, and historians to appeal to the better nature of free people who usually desire peace and stability.

Writing on July 17 on the popular Space.com web portal, Robert Z. Pearlman recalled the Apollo-Soyuz anniversary, and quoted current U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke, who during a July 10 press conference recalled that he was 8 years old during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, but remembered:

“It made a big impression, not just on me, but on the rest of the world — that if the Soviet Union and United States can work together in space, maybe we can work together here on Earth.”

A similar sentiment came from one of America’s most prolific space historians, Fordham University’s Dr. Asif Siddiqi, who was quoted in a July 17 New York Times article saying, “It’s amazing to think that two diametrically opposed countries with different systems and cultures, essentially ready to destroy each other, can somehow cooperate and do this highly technical, complicated mission.”

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  50 years after Apollo-Soyuz, the myth of Peace-In-Space endures on Earth