A year with few crews in orbit
By 1967 the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union to reach the Moon had been running for years, and the public image of it was one of rapid, confident progress. The reality of 1967 was different. It was a year in which no American astronaut flew in space at all, and in which the Soviet Union flew a single crewed mission that ended in disaster. Most of the real work happened out of public view: engine tests, uncrewed flights, probes sent ahead of people, and long arguments about what had gone wrong.
That makes 1967 a year of consolidation rather than headlines, but it decided a good deal about what came next.
January: the fire on the pad
The American year began with tragedy. On 27 January 1967, during a ground rehearsal on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, a fire swept through the first crewed Apollo spacecraft. Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died. The cabin held pure oxygen, there was a good deal of flammable material inside, and the hatch was hard to open quickly. The Apollo 1 fire led to a thorough review, a major redesign of the command module and a long pause in crewed flights. The next crewed Apollo mission, Apollo 7, did not fly until October 1968.
By a coincidence of dates, the same day saw the opening for signature of the Outer Space Treaty, which set out basic rules for activity beyond the atmosphere. The treaty came out of years of United Nations discussion, and it was the sort of agreement that both superpowers had reasons to want, since neither was keen on an arms race in orbit.
The American programme without astronauts
With the Gemini series finished in November 1966 and Apollo grounded, the American programme in 1967 was largely uncrewed, and it was busy.
- Surveyor. Surveyor 3 made a soft landing on the Moon in April and dug into the soil with a scoop. A later Surveyor mission lost contact shortly before its intended landing, but Surveyors 5 and 6 landed successfully in September and November.
- Lunar Orbiter. Three of the five Lunar Orbiter missions flew in 1967, completing a photographic survey that helped planners choose where astronauts might land.
- Saturn V. On 9 November the first Saturn V left its pad in a flight called Apollo 4. This was the largest rocket the United States had built, and an almost flawless first launch was a considerable relief.
- Mariner. In October, Mariner 5 passed Venus, giving scientists new information about its dense atmosphere.
Taken together, these flights were the groundwork. Engineers wanted to know the Moon’s surface would bear a spacecraft, where flat ground could be found, and whether the giant rocket and its heat shield would work before any crew relied on them.
The Soviet programme and its losses
The Soviet effort was run largely in secret, and it had lost its guiding figure when the chief designer Sergei Korolev died in January 1966. The programme still had real ambitions: a new spacecraft, Soyuz, to replace the older Vostok and Voskhod craft, and a very large rocket, the N1, that had not yet flown.
Soyuz 1 launched on 23 April 1967 with Vladimir Komarov alone aboard. It was meant to be the first stage of a docking and crew-transfer mission, but the spacecraft had a series of faults, and Komarov was killed when his parachutes failed during landing. He was the first person to die during a space flight itself. Crewed Soviet flights did not resume until October 1968.
The Soviet programme had better news with uncrewed craft. In October, the probe Venera 4 transmitted data while descending through the atmosphere of Venus, one day before Mariner 5 made its flyby. Later that month, two uncrewed Soviet satellites carried out what was described as the first fully automatic docking.
Money, politics and public mood
The programme was expensive, and it competed for attention with other demands. President Johnson was trying to fund the Great Society at home and the Vietnam War escalation abroad, and the political appetite for open-ended space spending was weaker than it had been in the early 1960s. After the fire, there was also a sharper public and congressional focus on whether the programme was being run safely. The goal set in 1961, of landing a person on the Moon before the decade ended, remained in place, but few observers in the middle of 1967 would have called it assured.
Aircraft as a sideshow
The year also saw flight development closer to the ground. The X-15 rocket plane was lost in November with its pilot, Michael Adams. The first Boeing 747 was rolled out in September, and the Concorde airliner was unveiled in December. These belong to a different story from the Moon race, but they show that aerospace engineering was changing in several directions at once.
What 1967 set up
The setbacks led to caution, and the caution paid off. NASA’s slower pace allowed hardware problems to be found on the ground. A second uncrewed Saturn V flight in April 1968 had real troubles, which were corrected before the third Saturn V carried the Apollo 8 crew around the Moon in December 1968. The first landing followed in July 1969.
On the Soviet side, the delay after Soyuz 1 gave engineers time to fix the spacecraft, but the N1 remained a difficult project, and it did not reach the Moon.
Looking back, 1967 was neither a triumph nor a defeat for either side. It was the year both programmes paid for their mistakes, and the work done in those months made the later achievements possible.