The concept of a military space shuttle is first brought up in this episode. In reality, the US government was in the final phase of completing a military shuttle at the airing of the episode, though it was a classified program at the time. The X-37 was air-tested in 2006 and flew its first mission in space in 2010.
Arnold Vinick's joke "We're going to run out of primetime" before his acceptance speech is a reference to Ronald Reagan when he was accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1980, where he told the crowd that wouldn't stop cheering "We're using up primetime!"
Josh (Bradley Whitford)'s "Outside of Minnesota" rider to Leo (John Spencer)'s observation that, though entertaining, people don't vote for "the loudmouth in the leotard" is a reference to one-time Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, a former wrestler and wrestling commentator elected to gubernatorial office in 1998.
The ISS is compartmentalized, so a leak in one pod can be circumvented by sealing off the module from the rest of the station. Even if the crew couldn't isolate it, sealing off the modules would allow them to do that. And if the station would have to be evacuated, it is equipped with a Soyuz landing capsule. Every few months the Russians swap out the Soyuz. They send up a new crew and the old crew takes the old Soyuz down, leaving the new one as an escape option. The capsule can fit three people. The station crew complement is usually 2-3 people. NASA was also developing a glider-type escape pod in case there is a problem with the Soyuz. So there shouldn't be any need for the Russians to organize a launch or to rush a space shuttle into service.
This episode's title is taken from a part of a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. The phrase was also famously used by Chinua Achebe as the title of his 1958 novel.