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.