Part I: International Interests

Throughout the 1990s, the two nations retrofitted and reengineered launch vehicles, spacecraft, and their support systems for the Shuttle-Mir Program, the International Space Station (ISS), cooperation in remote sensing, as well as the commercial launch of communications satellites. The adaptive reuse of these Cold War artifacts reflected new priorities for the US and Russian governments: the acceptance (or criticisms) and use of these technologies were shaped by con­cerns for trade liberalization, nuclear disarmament, and Cold War budget con­straints. American fears over idle productive capacity and the lingering threat of postwar unemployment at home were coupled with the threat of Asian industrial ascendance in the 1990s.

In marshaling resources for cooperation, proponents of the ISS chose not to approach cooperation as a definitive set of one-time deals or off-the-shelf purchases. Instead, they suggested that the collaborative use and development of space technologies fostered relationships within and among governmental complexes—each in their own way coming to grips with the end of the Cold

War. The international policies of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore (in some ways an extension of the Bush administration) illustrate that Russian-American cooperation in space was but one element of many fields of postwar cooperation—each intended to foster enduring ties of trade, finance, technical development, and environmental stewardship.

That said, it was not inevitable that the United States and Russia join space programs a scant four years after the fall of the Soviet Union.