In recent years, Muhammad bin Salman’s grandiose reimagining of the Red Sea and northwestern Saudi Arabia has witnessed the announcement of a cluster of ostensibly “green” mega-projects, most notably NEOM and The Line. The Crown Prince has expressed a desire to bring Saudi Arabia back to the modernizing trajectory of the pre-1979 era, prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution and what he has pointed to as an Islamist over-reaction in the Kingdom. While Western observers have often sneered at the vaulting ambitions of these futuristic designs, it is worth noting that not unlike the consulting firms tasked with carrying out these projects today, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have a long history of futurist collaborations with American engineers, architects, and Space Age “visioneers.” To better understand the pre-1979 Saudi Arabia that the Crown Prince has vowed to reawaken, this paper revisits the reign of King Faisal (1964-1975). It follows the visionary career of King Faisal’s son, Muhammad bin Faisal. Bin Faisal, a 1963 graduate of Menlo College, located near San Francisco, is a prime example of how the fantasies of Cold War California stoked the imagination of the Kingdom. During his college years, the US Office of Saline Water touted desalination as the key to saving California from the looming water crisis associated with Colorado River dam and diversion projects. The 1960s witnessed major advances in desalination research, especially centered around San Diego and Los Angeles. During his time, Bin Faisal visited California Edison’s Ventura combined desalination and power plant. Inspired by what he saw, he returned home with the idea that would become his legacy. From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, he emerged as the principal architect of Saudi Arabia’s collaboration with the Office of Saline Water, laying the groundwork for Saudi Arabia’s emergence as the world’s largest producer of desalinated water. After his father’s assassination in 1975, Bin Faisal also experimented with the idea of towing Antarctic icebergs to Jeddah to harvest freshwater. Although the doomed company and academic conferences that flowed from this idea are often the first anecdote associated with the prince, it is critical to note that even this seemingly zany idea was part of the mainstream of American Cold War technopolitical experiments with desalination, nuclear power, weather modification schemes, and the roots of what we now call geo-engineering. This paper seeks to reconstruct Saudi Arabia’s connection to California and the American techno-scientific empire.