It’ll be the half centenary of humanities first international space endeavor. It happened between the Soviets and the USA and was the harbringer of the end of the cold war and helped pave the way for the Berlin wall coming down.

Now as of the date of publishing this humans have maintained a constant presence in space for 19 years and 220 days, represented international from member of many nations.

It has taken tremendous international cooperations to achieve this.

There is already an astonishingly massive and actually wonderful amount of internantional legistlation in place to help manage this affairs cooperatively and some important international standards have been established.

Physics was responsible for most of this. If you want the pole to fit in the hole it has to be the right size, right?! So there was massive degree’s of engineering endeavors to accomplish – together.

But there was also another part to all this. The Vietnam war was going on at the time. There was massive protests in the US against the war. The Soviet Union was quite frankly running out of cash and political credit.

I would never argue all in one way or the other for the US way of life vs the Soviet and now Russia way of life but I think on July 15th 1975 when US and Soviets met in space and shook hands, conducting experiments together – the US spacecraft was positioned to eclipse the Sun so the Soviet to photo the corona… both side took copies home!

But it was all done while the cold war was pettering out and the Vietnam war was coming to an end. Both sides had enough own woes to still be so much at logger heads with one another.

And so ended the first Space Race on 15th July 1975.

Now consider, I was not born then and I clearly remember the Berlin wall coming down in 1991 when I was 14. So the USA and Soviets had still yet to get over the Vietnam war between them. Then have the another ‘surrogate’ war in Afghanistan and then reach a level of international ‘Detente’.

All the while they’re military commanders had shook hands and worked cooperatively for the betterment of humanity in ’75 aboard very close quarters without a weapon in sight!

Just not on the ground is all.

But all the legistlation and international cooperative ability is there, laid down in black and white and operational despite the tides of the world. And exploitable.

Elon Musk is about to be the first Johny come lately to the game who is about to use his own privately owned company to send a non-US dude to the space station from US soil in the history of humans.

It’s never been done before. He’s only just been the first dude ever with a private company to launch people into space last month!