Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth

Andrew Jenks’s Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth challenges the dominance of the competitive paradigm in the history of early space-flight and turns our attention to international collaboration in space. Jenks’s analysis does not end in the deep of outer space. Still, it returns to Earth in order to shed light on political and societal implications resulting from the internationalization of efforts in space. - Darina Volf, A Postdoctoral Researcher at LMU Munich, Technology and Culture 63, no. 3 (2022), pp 885-86. 

Jenks describes how a handful of commissars and Apollo Lunar Module pilots saw space exploration as an alternative to the Cold War, but the ruthless apparatchiks who wrote the checks—Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon—were not the ones with their heads in the clouds. Their pieties about “universal brotherhood” were simpleminded and solipsistic, uttered in the hope that history would remember these two warmongers as better men than they knew they were.—Matthew Lavine and Alexandra Hui.