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First Moon landing was nearly a US–Soviet mission

As today’s tensions mount, it is salutary to recall that cooperation was on the table during the cold war, writes Roger D. Launius.
  1. Roger D. Launius

    1. Roger D. Launius is a former chief historian of NASA.

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The Apollo programme that took humans to the Moon is properly viewed as an outgrowth of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Today, as strained US relations with foreign powers threaten science once more, it is worth recalling how surprisingly close the Moonshot came to becoming a cooperative venture.

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Nature 571, 167-168 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02088-4

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