Chapter 1 told the history of ASTP from the perspective of the principal political and diplomatic actors who attempted to use the supposedly neutral sphere of space science and engineering to reset superpower relations. This chapter covers similar terrain but reverses the order of analysis by examining the perspective of the engineers and how they attempted to design a technical solution to the political challenges of détente. Put another way, I discuss the engineering and design of technological fixes to solve the political problem of averting mutual assured destruction (MAD). The goal is to determine how well those fixes functioned politically (as a way to de-escalate tensions between the superpowers) and technically (by enhancing the safety and effectiveness of human habitation in space).

The term “technological fix” was coined in the 1960s by the director of Oakridge National Laboratories, Alvin Weinberg. The basic idea was hardly new. Modern faith in technology had produced a mania for technological fixes, a belief that “solutions founded on technological innovation may be innately superior for addressing issues traditionally defined as social, political, or cultural.” The main attraction of the technological fix is that it promises to bypass the cultural and political challenges of changing behaviors and attitudes by shifting the problem to the supposedly objective realm of technical problem-solving, and to the experts and engineers who supposedly have only technical rather than partisan goals. For example, advocates of nuclear power in the 1960s, like solar or wind power today, presented it as a solution to the economic and political dilemmas of fossil-fuel dependence. If it worked as planned, politicians would avoid the hard work of changing deeply entrenched behaviors of energy consumption, providing a cheap way to produce and consume power that would also protect the environment. It was a case of having your cake (energy independence and a cheap power source) and eating it too (blissfully tapping into the electric grid without destroying the environment).

ASTP was a technological fix designed to make superpower relations less dangerous and more secure, and it had the added benefit of advancing the cause of space exploration. Up to that point, with US troops mired in Vietnam and Soviet troops blasting away hopes of reforming communism in Czechoslovakia, little else seemed to be working to mitigate the literally explosive potential of superpower relations.