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We have grown accustomed to the near-constant invocation of "crisis" as part of our everyday media consumption. During periods of insecurity, historically contingent crisis imaginaries tend to evolve, linking developments in the historical present to cultural memories of a fearful past and visions of an unwanted future. A historical understanding of these imaginaries, along with their societal and material aftermath-including their impact in relation to political choice and decision-making-is imperative for the history of technology. This article aims to problematize the complex relationship between crisis imaginaries and technological futures acknowledging the triple temporality of crises. In order to shed light on the rich potential of historical research into the entanglements of past-and futureoriented crisis narratives, we exemplify this approach in three empirical research themes: security and the experience of past and future; fears as drivers of technological development; political decision-making and the future of space mining.

ITER (short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and the Latin word for 'the way', as in 'the way to new energy'), a controlled thermonuclear fusion experiment currently being built in Cadarache, France, is one of the world's largest technoscientific collaborations. ITER's complex organisation is rooted in decisions taken during the early negotiation phase in the 1990s. This article focuses on this initial period of the ITER negotiations, showing the importance of reciprocity and compromise in the organizational decisions of the project. These decisions were enacted by actors and organisations who strived to keep ITER together through continuous 'backstage' diplomacy work. This work included finding acceptable compromises for the involved Parties on both a diplomatic and scientific level. Looking closely at such work reveals the entangled character of science and diplomacy in large international technoscientific collaborations, as well as the need for compromise to make a project like ITER materialise.

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Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new modes of transnational cooperation.