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).