The ongoing Artemis II mission—set to carry humans once again into lunar orbit—marks a significant moment for contemporary space exploration. It reflects accumulated technological progress, decades of experience, and renewed ambition.
But if we are serious about understanding how humanity reached this point, we cannot begin the story here. The road to Artemis did not start in the 21st century nor in the laboratories of private corporations. It began in a very different political and social context: with the first socialist state in history, the Soviet Union.
This is not a matter of symbolic “priority” or patriotic narratives. The early Soviet breakthroughs did not just come first—they established the basic architecture of how we still operate in space today. Orbital flight, life-support systems, extravehicular activity, long-duration missions—these were not gradually discovered across competing systems. They were, in their decisive form, pioneered under socialism.
The turning point came in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. With that single act, the Earth ceased to be the absolute limit of human activity. For the first time, an artificial object entered stable orbit. This was not only a technical success—it was the proof that the laws of physics governing spaceflight could be mastered in practice. Everything that followed—communications satellites, navigation systems, weather monitoring—rests on that breakthrough. Without it, the infrastructure of modern life would look very different.
Shortly after, Laika, a mixed-breed stray from the streets of Moscow, was sent into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The mission remains controversial, and rightly so. But its scientific significance cannot be dismissed. It provided the first real data on how a living organism responds to weightlessness and sustained acceleration. Heart rate, respiration, stress responses—these were not theoretical questions anymore. They became measurable realities, and that knowledge fed directly into the preparation for human flight.
Then came the moment that changed everything. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth aboard Vostok 1. One orbit. Just 108 minutes. And yet, it fundamentally altered humanity’s understanding of itself. A human being had left the planet and returned alive. Not a test pilot in an experimental jump, but a full orbital flight. The image of Earth from space—borderless, finite, shared—enters human consciousness at that point. It is hard to overstate what that meant.
The sequence did not slow down—and, more importantly, it did not remain at the level of isolated triumphs.
In 1959, Luna 2 struck the lunar surface, confirming that interplanetary travel was not speculation but engineering. Soon after, Luna 3 sent back photographs of the Moon’s far side—territory no human eye had ever seen. These were not symbolic gestures. They were reconnaissance missions in the deepest sense, extending human knowledge into previously unreachable domains.
In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6, thus becoming the first woman to travel into space. That flight stands as a milestone not only in space history but in social history. It showed, in concrete terms, that access to the most advanced fields of science and technology did not have to remain confined within old hierarchies. It opened a door that others would take decades to walk through.
A year later, Voskhod 1 carried multiple crew members into orbit simultaneously, forcing new approaches to spacecraft design, coordination, and survival in confined environments. And in 1965, Alexei Leonov stepped outside his spacecraft into open space. That moment—fragile, dangerous, almost improvised—opened the door to everything from satellite repair to the construction of orbital stations. Every modern spacewalk still follows that path. However, stopping at these “firsts” misses the deeper point.
The Soviet contribution was not only to open space—it was to make it habitable. Programs like Salyut, followed by Mir, transformed space from a place of brief visits into a domain of sustained human activity. Long-duration missions, crew rotation, onboard scientific work, docking procedures—these are not secondary developments. They form the operational backbone of today’s space stations and of any serious plan for lunar or Martian presence.
In other words, the Soviet Union did not simply reach space first. It defined how humanity would remain there. That obviously raises a question often avoided. How did a country devastated by war, operating under immense external pressure, manage to lead humanity into a new frontier?
It was not chance, nor can it be reduced to individual brilliance. It was the outcome of a system capable of directing education, industry, and scientific effort toward long-term goals without subordinating them to immediate profitability. Science was not treated as a commodity to be justified quarterly. It was treated as a collective necessity.
And that difference is not abstract. It has consequences that reach into the present.
Because today, as new missions are announced and celebrated, another reality unfolds alongside them. Space is increasingly framed as a field of private competition and commercial opportunity. Billionaires launch rockets—not as representatives of collective progress, but as proprietors of access itself. The language has shifted. Exploration is repackaged as investment. Orbit becomes market.
And yet, strip away the branding and the spectacle, and what remains is familiar. The trajectories, the life-support systems, the logic of long-duration presence—these were not invented in the era of privatization. They were inherited.
So yes, Artemis II deserves recognition. It represents real technical achievement and genuine human effort. But it does not stand at the beginning of the story. It stands on ground prepared decades earlier, under very different priorities and conditions.
The first decisive leap into space was not driven by profit, nor by spectacle. It was driven by a system that understood scientific advancement as a shared human task. That is why it succeeded in breaking the limits of Earth.
Today, we are told that the future of space lies in competition, ownership, and commercialization. But the history of how we got there suggests something else entirely. The greatest leap humanity has made beyond this planet did not emerge from the logic of the market.
And if we forget that—if we accept a future where space is reduced to a playground for capital—then we are not advancing the legacy of space exploration. We are dismantling it.
The first great leap beyond Earth was not the triumph of markets, but of socialism. And it is no coincidence that the system which opened space did so by treating science as a collective human endeavor, not a commodity.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
