“Gloom and Embarrassment Over the Landing of the United States Astronauts …”: The Moon Landing as a Soviet-American Media Event

The ‘race to the moon’ and the American moon landing were significant symbolic media events during the Cold War that created synchronous, transnational communication spaces across the Iron Curtain. Such media events condensed the system competition and thus made it perceptible and interpretable for people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The moon landing can be told in a media-historical perspective as an interweaving history of the Cold War because it was a history of mutual transnational observation: the observation of the space flights of Apollo 11 and Luna 15 as well as the mutual reactions to the observations of the ‘others’. Using the moon landing as a case study, therefore, this article examines how political blocs intertwined national publics and their discourses under the polarized conditions of the Cold War. The focus is on the respective foreign correspondents who, in the sense of Niklas Luhmann, conveyed ideas about the respective other society. It was mainly the correspondents who contributed to the mutual observation and reported on the respective foreign observation of the ‘other’ side. Therefore, it will be asked how the correspondents constructed the system competition medially, how their reportages politicized the events through mutual (outside) observation, through which the ideological blocs could converge and demarcate themselves. The aim is to illustrate that public communication across borders and blocs constituted events on the one hand and, on the other, could itself become an event in the specifically binary communication logic of the Cold War. In the process, the mutual media observations in the Cold War produced competing ideas about the ‘Other’. But despite all the competition, they also produced relations and interconnections that sometimes contradicted the binary logic of the Cold War.