The value of knowing the Laplace transforms of the basic functions described in the previous chapter is greatly enhanced by certain properties of the Laplace transform. That is because these properties allow you to determine the transform of much more complicated time-domain functions by combining and modifying the transforms of simple functions such as those discussed in .

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.

Space exploration, as noted in the introduction, was driven by tensions between cosmopolitics and utopian visions of a new global community. In the words of the Dutch astronomer H. C. van de Hulst, recipient of the 1990 Planetary Award at the Association of Space Explorers annual conference in the Netherlands: “When a system without frontiers, such as science, meets a system with frontiers, such as politics […] a dialogue between the political and scientific systems must take place in order to minimize the turbulence which could be encountered.” The world was at the center of this turbulence zone, transformed into a staging ground for Cold War military competition. Yet the same processes of militarization also created the sense of urgency that inspired new experiments in cosmic and terrestrial collaboration. The first part of the chapter discusses early ideas about global forms of consciousness and their connection to space travel, pacificism, and transnational utopias. It then turns to two areas that became launching pads for further acts of collaboration. The first was a joint US–USSR moon-mapping project and the second the formation in 1985 of a nongovernmental organization in Paris called the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), founded by many of the principal actors of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). ASE considered itself to be a vanguard of a peace-loving and ecologically aware transnational community to which all people, they hoped, would soon belong.

The Cosmic Perspective

Historian Robert Poole has commented on the iconic image snapped on Christmas Eve 1968 from Apollo 8. “Looking back,” wrote Poole, “it is possible to see that Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it meant for the Earth.” Yet even before the Earthrise moment of the late 1960s, competing urges to escape into space (as a way of transcending human limitations) and to recognize the need to confront those challenges on Earth had a long pedigree. Like the astrofuturist ideal pursued in the West by science fiction writers such as Arthur Clarke and engineers like Wernher von Braun, the Russian cosmists at the beginning of the twentieth century believed the survival of the species required the colonization of other planets. Space colonization, in their view, was both the solution to terrestrial problems and the culminating point and rationale for human development.

The shorthand “space race” has dominated popular and academic understandings of space exploration. Yet the history of space has also been marked by extensive episodes of international collaboration, including the linkup between the Apollo and Soyuz capsules on July 17, 1975, the Soviet Interkosmos crewed missions of the 1970s and 1980s, the Mir space station and Shuttle couplings of the 1990s, and the launching of the International Space Station on November 22, 1998. The Soviet Union developed an extensive program of collaboration, reaching across the so-called Iron Curtain in the 1960s and 1970s to work with France on a number of different joint engineering and scientific projects. Beginning in 1978, the Soviets initiated the first of many international crewed missions that would launch individuals into space from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, France, Cuba, Hungary, Vietnam, India, Syria, Mongolia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Austria, and many others. With every mission, the map of space exploration became more diverse ethnically, racially, and politically (though not so much in terms of gender). While the United States was less focused on international collaboration until the end of the Cold War, it, too, worked with the Soviets and the European Space Agency on various collaborative ventures.

This book tells the early history of collaboration in space, focusing on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). ASTP was a showcase of the policy of détente and the dividing line between the earlier phase of the space race and the new period of space collaboration (1970–present). The chapters that follow discuss ASTP and its aftermath. They provide a thick description of the foundational acts of collaboration among the superpowers of the Cold War and interrogate the historical significance of cooperation in space, which is often dismissed as a symbolic gesture, at best, and at worst as a colossal waste of money with little political, cultural, scientific, or technological significance. The history of collaborative space investigation illustrates the many competing forces—military and civilian, transnational and national, technological and political—that have driven space engineering since its military origins in the Nazi V-2 rocket program of World War II. That program provided much of the initial expertise, human resources (e.g., Wernher von Braun) and technology that jumpstarted the space age.

The mission of ASTP was to conjoin two nations that were locked in a seemingly unstoppable race toward nuclear Armageddon. It was at once a technical and political project of creating codependency (in the positive sense). The hope was that the hybrid features of the docking mechanism would turn hostile superpowers into a mutually dependent system, thereby challenging a relationship that had been based on a zero-sum game mentality. The former allies and vanquishers of Nazism were walled off from each other; they were separated by iron and ideological curtains which were reinforced with missile silos, barbed wire, checkpoints, secret military complexes, and a mediascape that increasingly depicted the other as irredeemably evil.

Alongside the dehumanizing images each side had pursued a position of domination, engaging in feats of technological one-upmanship in space and on Earth. Real and ritual displays of domination marked the timeline of the Cold War: for Americans, the famous and menacing image of Sputnik flying over and beeping on American territory; for Soviets, the planting of the American flag on the moon. Meanwhile, both sides waged, funded, and supplied bloody proxy wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The very tall mission of ASTP and space collaboration in general was to transform the superpower relationship into something neutral, ambiguous, and based on parity and mutual respect, “a full-fledged and equal partnership,” in the words of the Soviet docking system designer Vladimir Syromiatnikov. The key was to collaborate in an engineering project without either side giving up its ideology and unique systemic features—politically, technologically, and socially. Advancing an alternative to the Cold War imaginary, as noted in Chapter 1, ASTP thus involved the idea of the “sociotechnical imaginary”—the projection of ideas about social and political progress through scientific and technological projects—which in the case of ASTP conveyed a radical new understanding of Soviet-American relations based on peaceful technical and economic collaboration and the voluntary refusal by either side to dominate the other. Ideally, the engineering of that system would spread from the mechanical and technological spheres of space exploration and into the social, political, and cultural realms of Cold War culture, effectively ending the Cold War and creating a new phase of global development based on the creation of interfaces that would result in the hybridization of opposites (communist and capitalist, Soviet and American, Apollo and Soyuz, male and female).

Thomas O. Paine, the scientist, General Electric (GE) executive, and former NASA administrator in the Nixon administration, traveled to Moscow in October 1987 to attend the “International Space Future Forum.” He was shocked by the attitudes he encountered. US officials were “evasive about space goals, and suspicious of dealing with foreigners,” while the Soviets pursued projects of “cooperation with European and Japanese space capabilities.” He was struck by the “openness of Soviet scientists compared to the uncertainty, aimlessness, and […] xenophobia of Washington space officials.” Paine's observations highlight a surprising turn of events: While the US space program was hostile to international collaboration, the Soviet Union was opening its space programs on numerous fronts—with France in 1966, with the United States through the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in the first half of the 1970s, and with other communist and noncommunist nations. This chapter evaluates Cold War regimes of information management and secrecy through the prism of ASTP and its aftermath. Its goal is to explain the surprising end point of the Cold War in which the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had stepped into the role of defending more open information exchanges against the global forces of militarization and classification, led by the United States. The move toward greater openness in the Soviet Union originated in the late 1960s, suggesting that the Soviet system of the Brezhnev era was anything but stagnant as it developed orbital stations and extensive programs of scientific and technological collaboration with friendly and formerly hostile foreign powers in the 1970s and 1980s. Those programs, and science and technology exchanges more generally, gave the Soviets a seemingly neutral and technocratic sphere that transcended the binary ideological oppositions of the Cold War, ultimately making détente and Soviet outreach to the noncommunist world possible. As a result, the Soviets began to dismantle the elaborate system of secrecy for which it was notorious, anticipating, at least in part, Gorbachev's policies of new political thinking (novoe politicheskoe myshlenie) and glasnost’ in the late 1980s.

Regimes of Secrecy across the Ideological Divide

During and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union viewed science and technology as instruments of national power. Both countries, for example, devoted more funding to big science and technology projects, creating a closed model of scientific and technological research tied to national security.

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.