From Harpers: Ad Astra: The coming battle over space

The next stage in warfare.

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. . . during the Cuban Missile Crisis, after which the possibility of nuclear war seemed intolerably near. In August of the next year, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed a treaty prohibiting further testing of nuclear weapons in Earth’s atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. But the United States and the Soviet Union had still other concerns about the heavens: one of the two nations would make it to the moon first and could stake a claim, establishing a military base on that ultimate high ground. They pursued a second treaty as a hedge, using that agreement to declare that space would be free from territorial competition.

That document, the Outer Space Treaty, was signed by the United States, the USSR, and sixty other nations on the evening of January 27, 1967, in the East Room of the White House. Just an hour and fifteen minutes after they convened, a fire broke out, down the East Coast at Cape Canaveral, in the cockpit of the grounded Apollo 1 command module. The first three American astronauts in the moon shot program were killed within minutes. The disaster and the Outer Space Treaty shared the front page of the next morning’s New York Times.