The Cold War, unlike the very hot war that preceded it, first emerged as an imaginary conflict. There were no tank battles, aerial bombings, formal declarations of war, or direct military clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reversing the more conventional understanding of causality—from the concrete event to its representation—assumptions about the existence of a state of war between the two countries intensified ideological and military confrontation in the late 1940s, transforming the Cold War from an imagined event (an iron curtain that never existed except as a metaphor in Churchill's mind) into a seemingly objective reality (“Eastern Europe,” NATO, and the Warsaw Pact) and turning former allies into nuclear-armed enemies poised for war.

The terrifying next step to direct military confrontation was nearly complete when both superpowers fought proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and faced off over Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis. The history of the space program seemed to be a direct result of that confrontation, initiated in October 1957 by Sputnik and driving both sides to go higher and further into the cosmos as a way to measure political, technological, and, above all, military superiority. The military implications of rocket technology—that launching a satellite, dog, or person into space also proved the ability to heave an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) against your enemy—was not lost on anyone. However, what could be imagined as an expression of military superiority could also be unimagined, thereby reducing the potential for military confrontation.

This chapter examines the use of joint space technology programs to imagine an alternative to war. It focuses on the political history of the first major collaborative space engineering project between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in July 1975. While ASTP marked the transition from the space race to the age of space collaboration, it also built upon earlier precedents of cooperation. These efforts (admittedly half-hearted at times) grew out of broader scientific exchanges and cooperation between the two superpowers since the late 1950s, which had been conceived as a way to reduce tensions and create bridges across ideology. Both sides claimed that their space programs served the interests of scientific progress and world peace, and this was more than mere political smokescreen.