Introduction: An Alternative History of the Space Age

Summary

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.