Space The July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Encounter

the Soyuz-Apollo encounter in July 1975. picture NASA

A space premiere occurred in July 1975, which was of political importance. A crew of 3 U.S. astronauts aboard an Apollo capsule just met in space with a Soviet crew of two, which was flying a Soyuz craft. The "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project" matched the diplomatic chill thawing of these days. A certain form of a halt was then occurring in the Cold War. The race to the Moon, on the other hand, had been successfully won by the U.S.A., with the Apollo missions landing at the surface of the Moon between 1969 and 1972. No real space program of importance, further, was going on. A warming of relations between the USA and the USSR had been since, for example, in October 1969 when two Soviet cosmonauts paid a two-week visit to space facilities in the United States. They had declined a invitation to visit the Kennedy Space Center however), citing they lacked the authority to extend a reciprocal invitation for American astronauts to visit the Baykonur Cosmodrome. This trip came just three months after NASA astronaut Frank Borman and his wife Susan visited the Soviet Union, including the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City outside Moscow as the Apollo 11 lunar mission was unfolding. It was at the time that the Soviets accepted Borman’s return invitation for cosmonauts to visit the United States. Georgi T. Beregovoi, a veteran of the October 1968 Soyuz 3 mission, accompanied by his wife Lydia and son Viktor, and Voskhod 1 veteran and spacecraft designer Konstantin P. Feoktistov arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport on Oct. 20, 1969, where Borman warmly greeted them. The cosmonauts met briefly with President Richard M. Nixon, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, and Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoliy F. Dobrynin at the White House. Soviets had a chance to see or practice varied items of the U.S. space programs as they also had some entertainment like a visit at Disneyland, a American football game. They had attended the Broadway musical Hello Dolly, or actor Kirk Douglas invited them to a star-studded party at his house in Hollywood, or they did sight- or even industrial-seing. These first two tentative but successful reciprocal visits of astronauts and cosmonauts in 1969 had led to the visit of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong to the Soviet Union in May and June 1970 and the next visit of cosmonauts, Soyuz 9 crewmembers Andriyan Nikolayev and Vitali Sevastyanov, to the United States in October 1970. Around this time, the first joint meetings between top spaceflight managers of the two countries began, eventually leading to the 1972 agreement to carry out the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975. In May 1972, during a summit meeting in Moscow between the United States and the Soviet Union, President Richard M. Nixon and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Aleksey N. Kosygin signed an Agreement on Cooperation in the Exploration and the Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes

Meetings between American and Soviet managers, engineers and crewmembers took place at regular intervals in both countries. The selection of Soviet astronauts marked the first time the USSR publicly named any cosmonauts before they flew in space. Because the Apollo and Soyuz vehicles operated at different cabin pressures and atmospheric composition, the USA and the USSR jointly designed a Docking Module (DM) that acted as both an airlock and a transfer tunnel and a Docking System (DS) that allowed the two nations' spacecraft to physically join in space. The Americans built the DM as Soviets engineers the DS. As the Apollo spacecraft operated at 100 percent oxygen at a pressure of 5 pounds per square inch (psi) while the Soyuz normally operated a nitrogen/oxygen mixture at 14.7 psi, pressure in the Soyuz had to lowered to 10 psi prior to the docking. The docking systems' compatibility was jointly tested with a team of 11 Soviets specialists who had come to the KSC. The USA and USSR had settled five technical working groups, generally, since 1971 which adressed the following: joint simulations, emergency procedures, reviewing the results of tests performed on the docking system, reviewing the results of tests of the flight communications systems, or a final report on the compatibility of both spacecraft's life support systems. Konstantin D. Bushuyev, was USSR's ASTP project director as Gemini and Apollo Flight Director Glynn S. Lunney served as the American ASTP Manager. Out of precaution, the Soviets decided to fly a rehearsal mission, the Soyuz 16 which occurred by December 1974. In March 1975, flight controllers in both the USA and the USSR, and crews began a series of joint simulations. In a change also from previous Soviet practice, reporters had the opportunity to directly ask the cosmonauts questions. After successful joint training sessions in Houston in February 1975, it was the U.S. astronauts' turn to travel the Soviet Union by April, for the next round of joint training exercises and visited the Soviet launch facility in Baikonur in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. During the stay, a Soviet launch, on April 5, 1975 to the Salyut-4 space station had to abort their ascent and make a emergency landing. Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand, for the U.S.A., and the USSR cosmonauts Aleksey Leonov and Valeriy Kubasov eventually performed their flight and encountered in space. Their Apollo Command and Service Module and Soyuz, respectively, docked to each other, through a jointly designed, U.S.-built docking module. The docking took place on July 17, 1975, just after noon EDT, as both craft had launched two days before. A few hours later, the crews shook hands and exchanged ceremonial gifts, including U.S., Soviet and United Nations flags. The crews received a congratulatory message from the Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev, and a phone call from the U.S. President Ford

In the following years, the death of Mao-Zhe-Dong, the clerics revolution in Iran, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet troops brought back to a more usual type of relationship between the USA and the USSR. Hence, one had to wait until two decades later to see a renewal of the relationship between the two main actors of the space race. This time, however, the USSR had become Russia. The Shuttle-Mir program, then a part into the International Space Station (ISS) were the two cooperative programs which ensued. International collaboration among many nations would become the norm during the space shuttle era and ended like the current cooperation in human spaceflight seen at the International Space Station