In short, the world of Valerian is one in which the [docking of the Soyuz and the Apollo][1] heralded a new era of international cooperation rather than a further twenty years of Cold War. A large international co-project was evidently announced and the Alpha Space station was built in Earth orbit by the Russians *and* the Americans.

> *What happened in 1998, at Alpha Space Station in orbit around the
> blue-green world, was not merely two nations meeting. When the
> European Hermes spaceplane, proposed in the same year as that first
> historic handshake, arrived to dock at Alpha, it represented a
> coalition of nations. Space was no longer the province of a few tiny
> humans, but was rapidly evolving to belong to humanity.*
> 
> *The space station grew as time went by. In the year 2019, China’s
> massive Tiangong-3 spaceship was warmly welcomed when it came to take
> its place at Alpha. The captain of the Alpha Space Station, one
> thirty-year-old James Crowford, enthusiastically greeted his Chinese
> counterpart Wuang Hu, who himself could not seem to stop smiling.
> Later historians would mark this moment as the end of international
> tension, and the beginning of what was the first Great Age of human
> cooperation.*

> <sub><sup>[Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: The Official Movie Novelization][2]</sub></sup>


  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Project
  [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33216612-valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets