Bearhug in space

By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive

At the time, critics called it nothing more than a "costly space circus" and a "$250 million handshake." But the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975 marked one of the rare moments of warmer U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. It also paved the way for later international space missions.

Apollo-Soyuz, or, as it is listed in some history texts, Soyuz-Apollo, was a space mission created with a political context.

"It was important, symbolically, for cooperation in space," says Alex Roland, former NASA historian and chair of the history department at Duke University. "It also marked the end of the most competitive part of the space race, a larger phenomenon that began with Sputnik."

On July 15, 1975, a Soyuz spacecraft -- with its crew of Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov, lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in what was then the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. About eight hours later, a Saturn 1-B rocket, carrying an Apollo spacecraft and U.S. astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Donald "Deke" Slayton, was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

With much of the world below watching, the two spacecraft spent the next two days maneuvering into a docking position -- for the start of a then-unprecedented, manned international space mission.

Contact was made 140 miles above the Earth, over the Atlantic Ocean. Three hours after docking, Leonov greeted Stafford in the airlock with a handshake -- and a sentence in English.

"Glad to see you", he said.

"Ah, hello, very glad to see you," Stafford replied in Russian. The two men then exchanged a more traditional greeting -- a bearhug.

Much of the mission was devoted to symbolism. The cosmonauts and astronauts exchanged flags, souvenirs and plaques. Messages from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Gerald Ford were transmitted to the joined spaceships and around the world.

The astronauts and cosmonauts gave tours of their vehicles for a world audience. They also shared meals -- the Soviets hosting a dinner of honey cakes, Russian black bread, nuts, prunes, meat paste and cottage cheese. The Americans responded in kind -- featuring a choice of turkey, meatballs or chicken a la king, as well as seafood-mushroom soup. Toasts were also made, with borscht rather than vodka, in the name of friendship.

The spacemen also practiced docking procedures and conducted joint scientific experiments during their nearly two days together. Several of those experiments continued after Soyuz and Apollo parted.

Despite several minor technical glitches, including a leak of a potentially harmful chemical into the Apollo capsule during re-entry, both crews returned safely to earth -- Soyuz parachuting onto hard ground in the U.S.S.R. on July 21, and Apollo splashing down near Hawaii three days later.

The Apollo-Soyuz mission did more than signal improved relations between Moscow and Washington.

"The importance of this was the United States and Soviet Union were going to coordinate their different technologies, so one could rescue the other," Roland says. Unfortunately, as relations deteriorated between Washington and Moscow in the following years, any hopes for additional such missions evaporated -- until the shuttle-Mir missions of the early 1990s.

Apollo-Soyuz also marked the end of the U.S. Apollo space program, which included the lunar landings. It would be the last manned space mission for NASA for the next six years, as the U.S. space agency devoted its energies to developing the space shuttle. It also meant 1,800 people lost their jobs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

So just what, if anything, did the Soyuz-Apollo mission accomplish?

"If you ask my college students what Apollo-Soyuz was, they couldn't tell you," Roland says. "It has no historical significance. It was just another little blip in the Cold War."

But Apollo-Soyuz veteran astronaut Vance Brand -- who is now deputy director for aerospace projects at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California, believes the mission had a different legacy.

"I think the biggest benefit for us and possibly the world was that it was a foot in the door for us for better communications between the two countries," he says. "We served as an example in the midst of this very unfriendly Cold War ... that both sides could put everything into it and make it work."