Just before Christmas nineteen sixty eight, three men blasted off from Cape Kernaville, Florida.

Frank Bourman, James Lovell and Bill Anders were on a very special mission to orbit the Moon for the first time.

They were leaving behind a world in crisis.

Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in the metals, two hundred and thirty two gis killed and nine hundred wounded, makes one of the heaviest weeks in the Vietnam War.

Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at one forty four am today, June six, nineteen sixty eight.

Nineteen sixty eight was the year the world tore itself apart.

The unrest and violence had spread rappid in Paris.

It was a night of wild disorder.

Russians have occupied Czechoslovakia, and as the three astronauts soar into lunar orbit, they pray for the people back home.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was about form and void and darkness, with upon the face of the deep, and the bearing of God moved upon the face of the water, and God let there be light.

They go around the moon three times, recording data, trying to pick landmarks out of the relentless gray.

But I couldn't get it quick enough look at it to see it lany.

But on their fourth orbit, Bill Anders looks out of his left hand side window and he sees something that makes him lose that trademark astronaut composure.

Oh my god, look at that picture of it in the Earth coming up.

Wow, just over the Moon's curved horizon, A slither of bright blue is rising up from the blackness.

It's the Earth, this rich patchwork of green, white and dazzling blue coming out of the darkness, A small, perfect circle in our huge universe, so far away, so beautiful.

Film him color quick.

Bill scampers to get a camera and load a roll of film to get a once in a lifetime shot the Earth rising in the distance.

Probably seen that shot.

It's now become known as earth Rise, one of the most powerful photos ever.

It showed the world as a singular, fragile oasis, and God it was good and the girl a boy A good night.

I married, and God will have all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

When they landed, Bill, who took the photo, said, we came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

That photo.

It changed Bill.

He'd grown up your classic cold warrior, convinced the Soviet Union was evil incarnate, that America's role in the world was to defeat its enemies.

But when he saw the Earth, he had a profound realization.

This is the only home we have, and yet we're busy shooting each other, threatening nuclear war and wearing suicide vests.

It amazes me.

You can't go to space, see the Earth from a distance and come back the same person.

Bill was only in space for a week, and it changed his whole life.

It's an experience.

Many astronauts talk about the feeling of suddenly seeing our planet from a distance, realizing that we're all connected, that our humanity transcends national borders.

In politics.

The philosopher Frank White even gave that feeling a name, the overview effect.

I wonder if Serage Krikalev experienced something like it decades later in space for three and thirteen days, watching storms brew and subside, city lights go on and off, seeing no countries, no borders, just these huge, anonymous, yellow green chunks of land.

Suspended in a brilliant blue sea.

How did that change him and what would happen when he came back.

I'm Lance bass And from Kaleidoscope and iHeart and Exile Media.

This is the last Soviet It's early nineteen ninety two.

Sergei Krikolev has been in space for nearly a year.

After a long day of repair work, he floats over to his ham radio station, looking forward to a call with Maggie.

They talk about normal stuff, what he's been doing on the station, about Maggie's kids, But then the tone changes.

She says, Saragay, I actually have a question for you.

It's from a journalist.

He wants to know if the Russians are selling mer your space station.

Could it really be true they want to sell the station that he sacrificed so much to keep alive.

Sarage doesn't know what to tell Maggie.

In fact, the Russians had put a price tag on the space station six hundred million dollars.

NASA was tempted, but in the end the Americans decided it was a national security concern.

It went nowhere.

Meanwhile, the Russians are desperately trying to sell a seat to space.

It's the only way they can get enough cash to bring Saragey back, And so month after month, the same directive crackles across the radio.

Just stay put, But Sarah Gay is getting agitated eating.

He asked Mischi Control to send a supply craft with some honey to cheer himself up.

Sorry, they say none available.

Times are tough.

They sent lemons and horseradish instead.

But finally Sarah Gay receives the call he's been waiting for him.

We found a German cosmonaut.

He's buying a seat for twenty four million dollars.

You're coming home.

Sarahgee makes calls to his family.

The news spreads, he does a press conference.

One Russian journalist asked him, when you left Earth, it was still the USSR.

Your city was called Leningrad and now it's Saint Petersburg.

What is the biggest change for you?

Saragey pauses, then says, so much has changed, but what surprises me most is that at first the Earth was dark, and then it was light.

It was winter, then summer.

Now everything is thawing again.

That's the biggest change you can see from here.

His last days are filled with handover tasks, checks, final repairs, writing up notes for the next crew.

And then it's time to call Maggie.

You father, my you father.

Ready to go home?

Okay, she sounds flat, not her usual self.

I'm going to miss you, but blood, we're here to go home, he says.

I'm glad too, but I'm going to miss my friends.

And then the connection cuts and I'm Maggie.

You have a few things too that you would like to read to us that they actually sent to you from space.

Oh one is a very poignant letter.

That's Maggie on an Australian radio show.

Perhaps Margaret, you have read that that they considered say, a time traveler.

In other words, he was in space while his country changed its name, attract the political system.

Everything changed, everything changed, and their pay changed, their their rank or status, everything changed, and he was in space is going to return to a new world.

It was rather like he was a time traveler, time travel time traveler.

And I received a really lovely letter from Sudage.

Would you like to hear that letter?

It's rather interesting and this is what Sudhegey said, my head.

It translated to be precise.

It is as yet difficult to say how our life will change in these circumstances.

Previously, the borders between republics were by convention.

If the republics are separated anymore, there will be more problems from space.

The Earth is like a map, but in contrast to a map, there are no borders seen.

It is pleasant when there are fewer borders.

People can rub shoulders, be friends, travel freely among each other, and get to know one another more.

Many of our friends in real to live in different republics.

If rigid borders between neighboring people appear, then that will be bad.

Sarage's vantage point on the collapse of the USSR was to say the least unique.

Like Bill Landers, the guy who took the Earthrise photo serge experienced his own version of the overview effect.

He continues to say, there are always changes going on, even when one returns from a short journey.

One must become accustomed to changes, and his very last comment, it's a long flight now.

Rapid change is at home.

We know a lot from news on the radio, but for all that, in order to understand everything and get used to it, it is necessary to return and plunge into this life on the twenty fifth of March nineteen ninety two, Serge's capsule lands in the desert steps of Bikanore, now Kazakhstan, a new country.

People run to the capsule, open the hatch Saraghe's lungs fill with fresh air.

He feels hands dragging him out.

He tries to move, but his limbs feel like heavy dough.

His skin's clammy.

Someone is fanning his face with a handkerchief.

He feels a blanket being wrapped around his shoulders.

Warm broth is spooned into his mouth.

The press cameras click away in the background.

After the doctor has checked his blood pressure and heart rate, Surge, still pretty out of it, is bundled off into a small plane that's going to take him home.

But it's not home as he knows it.

When he left, his city was called Leningrad.

Now it's Saint Petersburg.

And in the new Saint Petersburg sarage, the hero who saved mere earns less than a taxi driver.

He discovers he can barely afford his weekly shop, and no one cares about cosmonauts.

Now we live in a different reality.

That's Artemi Trotzky again, one of the founders of the Gagaran raves.

I think that the perception of normal people here is just forget it all right, Yes, we're the first man in space.

It was great, but so what, so what the dream of the Soviets conquering space, the dream that started with Uri Gagaron, It's died.

Sarage Hessaker fist everything for this dream, his own body, time with his family.

But now finally back home, he's a nobody in this.

In your reality, they're simply low space for space.

Everything is very much down to Earth now, and Serage is maybe starting to wonder will he ever go to space again.

He's a real space here and the second biggest space hereafter, but in Les Condri is almost unknown.

His colleagues are leaving the Space Agency in droves to work in places making plastic toys, Coca Cola, Western products, and if they can't get those jobs, they sell their space metals in the metro.

But then sometime in the summer, just as the first long warm evenings are creeping up, Sarage gets an opportunity from an unlikely source, and I said, okay, what is it?

He said, well, it's STS sixty and you're going to have two Russian cosmonauts who are going to train with you, and one of them will fly, And I said, forget it.

I'm a marine.

I trained all my life to kill those guys, and they trained all their life to kill me, and I don't want to fly with any damn Russian.

My preconceptions about the USSR was that they were one of the most powerful militaries in the world, and that everything that they did was designed to take down the US, and that they would stop at nothing to do that.

They were our ultimate enemy.

That's Charles Bolden, retired astronaut and the first black NASA administrator well a day.

I did not want to become an astronaut growing up.

I grew up in the segregated South during the time of Jim Crow in schools, and because of the way things were when I grew up, I knew what astronauts were, but that was not anything that was remotely possible in my mind.

They were all white, they were all about five ten.

I was none of those and I never did become five ten, so I was never going to get tall enough to be an astronaut in my mind.

Instead, Charles joined the Army Major General Charles F.

Bulden, Jr.

US Marine Corps retired.

He fought against the Communists in Vietnam when things were at their hottest.

He risked his life and he came back to the US a certified Cold warrior, And in nineteen eighty one Charles applied to become an astronaut.

He went from fighting communism in the skies of Asia to doing it on a much higher plane space.

We lived in a bipolar world at that time, and the two powers had been the Soviet Union and the United States, with their president's finger was on the trigger that could destroy the planet.

So we were by no means friends were wanting to be friends at that time.

But then in December nineteen ninety one, the Soviet Union fell apart.

Just like that, the Cold War ended, America emerged victorious, and they saw an opening well today, for the first time an American president and the democratically elected president of an independent Russia had met.

In February nineteen ninety two, Bush Senior and the new Russian President Yeltsin met for the first time at Camp David, and we did so not as adversaries but as friends standing side by side, and their matching fur line parkers.

In front of the world's press, Bush presented the leader with a cake and a pair of black leather cowboy boots, and this his star meeting, was yet another confirmation of the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a new era.

But behind the scenes, away from the cameras, there were very serious talks in the back rooms where politics actually happens, and it was not about friendship and world peace.

No.

President Bush was worried about something else.

He became very concerned that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, everything that was a part of the Soviet space program, as well as all their science and technology, their nuclear arsenal, and everything might be subject to some nefarious either nation state or somehow, and he did not want to see all that go out across the world.

The Americans were basically afraid that newly unemployed Russian engineers, guys like Seragei, would go work for other countries not so friendly to America, say Iran, who knew where the bombs, where the brain power, where all that stuff was gonna go.

It sounds a little James Bond, the Maverick Sovid engineer going rogue building the most powerful nuclear weapon.

But this was a genuine worry, and so the Americans thought, we need to try to get hold of this ourselves first, which is how in nineteen ninety two, astronaut Charles Bolden found himself in his boss's office being assigned to a very special mission.

And I said, Okay, what is it.

He said, well, it's STS sixty and you're going to have two Russian cosmonauts who are going to train with you, and one of them will fly.

And I said, forget it.

I mean, I didn't even hesitate.

I said, George, forget it.

I'm a marine.

I trained all my life to kill those guys, and they trained all their life to kill me.

And I don't want to fly with any damn Russian.

But as boss says, look, we want to show the world that we can be friends with the Russians or former enemy, that we can work together, and this is how we want to do it this mission.

I understand your concerns, but the Russian cosmonaut chosen.

He's pretty impressive.

And it turned out that there was this cosmonaut, young cosmonaut by the name of Sergey Konstantinovitch Krikoloff, who was the commander of mir you know, the guy who agreed to stay in space as his country collapsed for almost a year.

And so he said, you may as well go to dinner with him and at least you see what you think and then come back in and tell me tomorrow morning.

Yeah, tomorrow morning, because Sergey is actually already in DC.

And what we were trying to find out was can we work together collaboratively or are we going to be at each other's throats and we just can't make this work.

That evening there's a dinner at a fellow astronaut's house, a seemingly relaxed affair.

The dinner turned out to be the critical event in this whole thing, and it was everything pivoted at the dinner.

There's a bunch of people there, but the two crucial players are Sage and Charles.

And so by way of introduction, we each started talking about our families.

I had a son and daughter.

Sarage said he had a daughter called Olga and you know, just a little baby, so to speak.

So our conversation turned immediately to our kids and what they were doing and everything, and eventually we started talking about you know what kind of world did we want our kids to grow up in.

If we were king for a day or whatever, what would we do to make the world a better place for our kids?

And we talked a pretty long time.

We were both the same way.

We wanted a peaceful world.

We wanted a world in which people work together collaboratively for the good of humankind.

And you know, we just made things better.

Charles came home that evening in a daze.

This was his first time meeting a Russian in person, a former enemy.

He was impressed, and turns out they share the same worldview.

The next morning, Charles calls his boss and says, I've changed my mind.

I'll go on this mission.

And so a couple of days after that dinner with Charles, Sage gets on another plane to the American star city, Houston, Texas.

That's after the break.

For this whole thing to work, Sarage first needs to integrate into the American way of life, and so NASA assigned him a trual handler.

My name is officially Kenneth S.

Rutler Junior.

Ken was in a way given the hardest job to introduce this Russian cosmonaut to capitalism.

He'd spent months thinking about what it might be like to be in Saragey's shoes.

He'd seen the news on TV, the empty shelves and the collapsing country, but now standing in Houston arrivals, it was time to put the research to the test.

We weren't sure about how they were driving.

We didn't know whether they understood how rental cars work.

I remember showing them how to go to a self service gas station and pump gas and pay for it, and how to go to an ATM and get cash out of it, things like that.

So Ken's got Sarage a car, a bank account, a new rental apartment, and now it's time to buy some groceries.

He takes Sarage to a giant supermarket nearby called Fiesta Marte.

A fun place.

It was one of the bigger, more interesting shopping centers.

Everything you could possibly want there.

Oh, Ken, bad choice.

I saw his eyes get bigger and bigger as he saw so much stuff on the shelves, and it was very clear that there was a decision process going on.

How am I going to decide how I buy food for my family?

Sage looks panicked.

Ken's confused, What is it.

That is the problem, and he explained that they didn't have that money selections, and so he was struggling with trying to make a decision of product day versus product.

Be Kins like, fine, we can take it easy.

Let's meal plan.

So we'll start with breakfast.

All right, Sergey, what do you like to eat for breakfast?

Well, I like to eat cereal.

Okay, great, let's go over here.

And he and I walked down to the cereal aisle.

There's a whole aisle of cereal, frosties, Coco pops, rice, crispies, and once again, you know, they eyes got big, and he said, well, you know, in the Soviet Union, we have two kinds of Syria.

We have white cereal and we have brown cereal.

That is a problem because we have a lot of cereal to choose from here.

It takes some time to put it lightly.

But finally Ken and Serage worked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner and make it to the checkout.

And I realized at one point we had really achieved a major breakthrough.

And that was when Sergey deferred to me to make a decision.

And so you got enough trust in my judgment and my tastes that I could make decisions for him.

I knew that we were on a really good path.

The next step on that path was the actual training, survival training, swimming training, ejection seat training, etc.

But the Americans aren't exactly worried about Serge doing his homework.

So I had been in space for five days, and Sergey at this point had had fifteen months in space.

He was the veteran space layout.

Serge had way more flight experience than almost than our whole crew put together.

And so on the third of February nineteen ninety four, when Serge was putting on a space suit ready to go into the capsule, Charles and Ken were one confident it was time to show the world that Americans and Russians could work together how systems are go for launch.

At this time just a few minutes away from the eighteenth voyage of Discovery on an eight day history making mission, but the first flight of a Russian cosmonaut aboard the United States Space Shuttle.

I don't think any of us ever lost track of the historical significance of what was about to happen.

Lit Alone, Serge two one, hisstor ignission and liftoff of discovery on a whole new era of space flight between the United States and Russia.

I think most of us in NASA understood that the primary focus of the mission, no matter what it said in the public affairs guide, was to be a demonstration and that ris Cosmos and NASA could come together, representing our two nations and demonstrate that we could effectively train to live and work together to carry off a successful mission that would benefit humanity.

And one of the things that we did for the Russian people, we wanted to do a gesture that would that would mean something in them, and so we learned a Russian lullaby.

I forget, I can't even remember the name of it, but every Russian child knows this lullaby because it's sung to them every night at about eight o'clock when their parents put them to bed.

That was the gesture to the people of Russia, to the children of Russia, to let them know that here's your crew member representing you and your country up here with us.

But we want to let you know how much we appreciate your culture, and this is our feeble effort to reach out to you.

As soon as they landed, a week later, the mission was declared a resounding success.

Welcome home Discovery, Prekrasna way for a new era of cooperation in human space flight.

Great job.

The teamwork that came about as a result of preparing for that mission and conducting it was priceless because when Sarage came back, the United States and Russia decided they could do something big together, something that would change space in politics forever.

In a few years, the brightest star ever will appear in the sky.

There will be a sign of hope because all these nations are coming together.

The utilized technology not to blow up humanity, but to make this place a better world.

They decided to build something the size of a football field in space, the most expensive man made object and perhaps humanity's greatest symbol of peace, an international space station.

It is what has allowed Russia and the United States from breaking up in the one successful venture that we have today with all of our diplomatic fur balls and crazy acting.

Next and final time on The Last Soviet, How Russia and America built something together in space and How I Almost got to Go.

The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and Exile Media produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and mangesh Hada Kadoor, with Oz Wollishan and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina Norville and Nikki Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio are Executive producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina.

Produced by Assia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sykes.

Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, Music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstrin, Mixing and sound design by Richard Ward, and special thanks to Nando Villa Well, Lissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lee.

If you want to hear more shows like this, nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen.