Apollo-Soyuz — The Handshake That Ended the Race
An Apollo command module docked with a Soyuz spacecraft on 17 July 1975, and Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands through the hatch about three hours later. It was the first international crewed spaceflight and the formal end of the space race that had begun with Sputnik eighteen years earlier. The engineering problem was real rather than symbolic. The two spacecraft used incompatible docking systems, and different atmospheres — Apollo ran pure oxygen at about a third of sea-level pressure, Soyuz a nitrogen-oxygen mix at close to full pressure — so a crew moving directly between them would have got decompression sickness. The answer was a purpose-built docking module carried by Apollo, which served as an airlock and carried an androgynous docking mechanism in which neither side was passive, a design still influential in later systems. The mission required each side to show the other its hardware, procedures and tracking networks, and American engineers visited Soviet facilities that had never been seen by outsiders. Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965, and Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury seven who had been grounded for nineteen years by a heart murmur and finally flew at fifty-one, were the crew's two most striking members. They spent two days docked, exchanged flags and seeds, and ate together. It was the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft. Americans and Russians did not fly together again until 1995, on the Shuttle-Mir programme. The docking hardware and the habit of cooperation were the foundation of the International Space Station twenty years later. Leonov and Stafford remained close friends for forty years.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Political
