On June 9, 1970, two men sat a couple of hundred kilometres above the Earth with a peg board and a radio, and did something nobody had ever done before. They played chess in space — against people who were anywhere but.
The players floated inside Soyuz-9, a Soviet spacecraft on a record-breaking 18-day mission. The point of the voyage was to learn how the human body held up in weightlessness over a long stretch. Nobody on Earth had been up longer than 14 days; no Soviet crew had lasted more than five. Andriyan Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov were, mostly, guinea pigs.
To keep them occupied, ground control planned light recreation. Sevastyanov was a serious club-level player who would one day head the Soviet Chess Federation, and when the suggestion of a game arrived on their first rest day, the crew jumped at it. Opposing them stood Colonel-General Nikolai Kamanin, the head of the cosmonaut training centre, and pilot-cosmonaut Viktor Gorbatko in mission control. Space took the white pieces. Fellow cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky handled the broadcast, announcing each move to the ship by radio.
Chess in orbit has practical problems gravity never had to solve. A normal board would drift apart and the pieces would wander off at the first knock of a thruster. So the set on board was a small travel board whose pieces sat on little pegs and grooves, keeping everything in place in zero gravity. It was the work of a young engineer, Mikhail Klevtsov.
Then there was the hardest problem of all: the radio. There were no communications satellites in 1970. The Soyuz could only reach a ground station while passing over it, so every few minutes the link between ship and control went dead. The game kept stopping, waiting for the ship to come back in range, then resuming where it had left off. The whole thing stretched across three orbits — roughly four and a half hours of airtime spread over reality — until it finally ran out of steam and ended in a draw.
The draw was fitting. Neither team had an edge, and neither side lost much. That first radio chess match was, in the end, less about winning and more about proving a board game could survive the trip at all — and that a quiet game could make a very lonely place feel a little more like home. The famous keeper of the Guinness records now calls the match the first board game ever played in space.
The little peg board did not vanish with the mission. Later it was autographed by the two cosmonauts and by the world champion of the day, Boris Spassky, along with Mikhail Botvinnik and Alexander Kotov. It was sold at Sotheby's in 2018 and now lives in the Chess Museum of the Russian Chess Federation — a small scheme of wood and plastic that quietly claimed a first for the game of kings.
And the tradition did not end with the Soyuz-9 crew. Half a century later, on June 9, 2020, two cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station faced Sergey Karjakin, a former world-championship contender, in a game timed to mark the original. Karjakin played from the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics, and said his nerves ran higher than in his world championship match. The space crew held the grandmaster to a draw — a repeat of the very first result, half a century old.
Space keeps trying to beat chess. So far, Earth has never lost the game — it just keeps agreeing to the draw.