Hands All Round and Four for Dinner

Seen by millions of earth-bound television viewers against the dark background of space, the deliberate, exquisitely choreographed ballet of the two spacecraft looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001. Gliding silently 140 miles high over the Atlantic, the U.S. Apollo made its slow, gingerly approach to the beetle-shaped Soviet Soyuz, whose features appeared so clearly on TV screens that sunlight could be seen glinting off its winglike solar panels. Then came the slight bump as the two ships, now somewhere over the North Atlantic, made contact. "We have succeeded!" Apollo Commander Tom Stafford exulted in awkward Russian. Replying in English, Soyuz's skipper Aleksei Leonov exclaimed, "Soyuz and Apollo are shaking hands. Good show!"

With that simple exchange, the Apollo and Soyuz crewmen celebrated an impressive technological achievement: the first rendezvous and docking of spacecraft of two different nations. Next on their agenda was a round of high-altitude, high-budget diplomatic theater carefully scripted for maximum political impact. Thus three hours after the docking, the TV cameras winked on inside the surprisingly spacious Apollo.

Smiling Faces. Drifting freely inside the cylindrical-shaped docking module linking the two spacecraft, Stafford and his crewmate Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton went through an elaborate checklist as they prepared to open the safelike docking door separating them from the Soyuz crewmen. At times the mission controllers in Houston had to remind the astronauts not to obstruct the view of the cameras ("Could you move to the left or right, please?".).

Finally, Slayton tugged on a large handle-like latch, and the door swung open, exposing the smiling faces of the two waiting Russians. Stafford called out ebulliently, "Tovarich [friend]!" Leonov's reply: "Very, very happy to see you. How are things?"

Stafford and Slayton crawled into the Soyuz and shook hands and exchanged bear hugs with Leonov and his fellow crewman, Valery Kubasov. Then they traded gifts, including flags and commemorative plaques; Leonov, a gifted amateur painter, gave the astronauts sketches he had done of them. After some small talk the four, plus Astronaut Vance Brand back in Apollo, sat back to listen to greetings from their national leaders. Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, in a message relayed by mission controllers outside Moscow, hailed the meeting in space as marking a "new page in the history of research." President Ford, sitting in front of a TV camera at his desk in the Oval Office, spoke with the crewmen directly. In the nine minutes he took to applaud the flight ("a very great achievement") and interview the five men in the engaging fashion of a substitute talk-show host, the linked spacecraft, coasting at 17,500 m.p.h., traveled all the way across the Soviet Union.

Soggy Borsch. Their first act of showbiz detente out of the way, the astronauts and cosmonauts settled down to other activities, including a meal four of them shared aboard Soyuz; Stafford bolted down three tubes of soggy borsch, only to resort to three Lomotil pills later. Soon it was show time again; as the lights and TV cameras clicked on for a joint press conference, the crews answered questions relayed from newsmen in Houston and Moscow. Leonov, fielding a question about the relative merits of Soviet and American space food, proved himself a deft diplomat. Said he: "It is not what you eat but with whom you eat that is important."

By the time the spacecraft parted company on Saturday, the two teams of spacemen had spent some 44 hours linked together. As Apollo pulled away, it blotted out Soyuz's view of the sun, creating an artificial solar eclipse that the cosmonauts photographed for astronomers. The ships then redocked briefly in a retest of the docking system, but this time the hatches remained closed. Before long the ships separated for the last time. As Soyuz pulled ahead under a gentle thrust from its rockets, the spacemen bade each other a final radio farewell. "Mission accomplished," said Leonov. "Good show," said Stafford.

If all went according to plan, Soyuz would spend another day and a half in space before landing July 21 under its single large parachute in the deserts of Kazakhstan, east of the Russians' Baikonur launch site. The Apollo crewmen, whose ship has far greater fuel and oxygen capacity than the smaller Soyuz, planned to stay in orbit another three days after the Russians landed, to conduct a series of experiments.

At 5:19 p.m. E.D.T. on July 24 after nine days aloft, Apollo is scheduled to come down in the Pacific some 345 miles west of Honolulu, where choppers from the helicopter carrier New Orleans will be ready to pluck the men and capsule out of the sea. Almost certainly, it will be the last such splashdown. In the future U.S. astronauts will touch down on jjmways, using the space shuttle--a cross between plane and rocket--scheduled for its first test flight in 1979.

For all the patent diplomatic puffery attending it, the great U.S.-Soviet space show commanded considerable attention round the world. Interest and approval were probably greatest in the Soviet Union, where Moscow, in a sharp reversal of past practices, gave the mission prolonged press buildup and provided extensive live coverage in an apparent effort to dramatize detente to the Soviet man in the street (see box next page). Outside the U.S. and the Soviet Union, admiration of the Apollo-Soyuz flight was sometimes mixed with doubts about its diplomatic implications. Echoing a concern often heard in France, as well as in some Third World countries, that detente means that Washington and Moscow are building a condominium of world power, the Paris daily Le Figaro posed a question: "Would the handshake in outer space, by accident, be a menace for the rest of the world, crushed under the two giant rivals who embrace over our heads?"

Though much of the suspense and excitement of earlier, more daring space missions was absent, the joint venture had its moments--and its anxieties. At Baikonur, the remote Soviet launch site 1,400 miles southeast of Moscow, the Soyuz roared off its pad only 5/1000ths of a second late. At Cape Canaveral, where the launch crowd of 750,000 included such VIPs as Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Actor John Wayne and President Ford's intern-photographer daughter Susan, the Apollo blast-off was a little tardier--about a half a second late, in fact.

Strawberry Juice. As usual, once aloft the spacemen had several minor glitches to cope with. The Russians hoped to transmit live shots of the cosmonauts during the liftoff, but the television system inside their spacecraft failed to work. Communications difficulties constantly plagued the Soyuz crewmen and their ground controllers.

The Apollo crewmen had their own problems--most of them small. A bag of strawberry juice burst, spreading its contents everywhere. (Joked Stafford: "We now have a strawberry-colored spacecraft.") A hitchhiking Florida mosquito was discovered buzzing around inside the spacecraft, and the crew's first night of sleep was interrupted twice when gremlins in the Apollo's intricate circuitry accidentally set off automatic alarms.

One potentially serious problem involved the Apollo's so-called docking probe, a bulky, 2-ft.-long piece of hardware that was used early in the flight to extract the docking module from its berth inside the second stage of the Saturn booster. When the time came, the astronauts found that they could not remove the probe; it blocked the entrance to the docking module and thus imperiled, among other joint activities, the historic handshake. Astronaut Vance Brand finally managed to free the probe by pushing aside a misplaced wire that had jammed the device in place.

After the link up, there was brief concern when an acrid smell was detected inside the docking module. But soon the Apollo crewmen determined that the odor was, in fact, a harmless if eye-stinging chemical vapor released during a metal melting experiment.

For the most part, however, the exercise went off with awesome precision. On their third day in space, as the more maneuverable Apollo edged ever closer to the Soviet ship, the astronauts reported that they had sighted Soyuz as a tiny speck more than 100 miles away over the Pacific--"very difficult to distinguish from a star," said Brand, "except that it's moving relative to the background." When the ships were only 48 miles apart, Moscow control sent up word in English: "We cross our fingers."

Then with another firing of its thruster, Apollo overtook Soyuz from below, pulled about 2,000 ft. ahead of it and gradually slowed down, narrowing the distance some more. Finally, the word came from Houston: "Moscow is go for docking. Houston is go for docking. It's up to you, guys."

At noon, when the ships came within range of a tracking station in Santiago, Chile, one of Apollo's four television cameras began sending pictures of the history-making rendezvous. Plainly visible outside Apollo's left window were the curved earth, one of the large finger-like petals of the docking module and, off in the distance, the winged Soyuz. After a few moments of maneuvering, Stafford nudged Apollo up against Soyuz so gently that there was barely a jolt as the three interlacing fingers on each ship locked together. Later at a briefing in Moscow, one of the Soviet controllers remarked that the Russians had been especially anxious during the last critical moments because, he said, films of Stafford's earlier space piloting and docking showed abrupt movements near other space vehicles. "Our docking is carried out somewhat more smoothly," said the Soviet controller. "I am glad to say that during the final stage Tom Stafford converted to the Russian faith."

Leonov, for his part, also did some skillful converting--linguistically. "Well done, Tom, it was a good show," said the Soviet air force colonel in his colloquial English. Mission rules called for each team to speak only the other's language and the Russians proved to be far better at dealing with that assignment than the Americans.

Prideful Huzzas. Was the mission really worth its cost, which came to about $225 million each for the U.S. and the Soviets? The Soviet leadership seems to have no doubts, as witness the prideful huzzas from the Kremlin hierarchy. Similarly, the Ford Administration, which is at least as eager to show tangible results from detente, seemed convinced that the big space trip was worth it. But other Americans are less certain. Along with critics like Russian Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they may wonder whether the Soviets simply got a free guide to superior U.S. technology.

Not so, says NASA Deputy Administrator George Low. He insists that it was the U.S. that learned a technological lesson from the Russians, rather than vice versa. How? Low says the joint mission exposed designers of the sophisticated Apollo system to the functional simplicity of less costly Soviet space hardware. On his visit to the Baikonur cosmodrome, Low was astonished to find out that the pad used to send off Soyuz had launched some 300 rockets, including the first Sputnik and the spacecraft that carried Yuri Gagarin on the first manned voyage into space. Said Low: "We have to learn not to overdo things when they don't have to be overdone."

The Soviet bent for simplicity, however, may not continue for long. For scientific as well as political and military reasons, the Russians can be expected to step up their space effort, launching up to six manned flights a year. After several explosions, they may also make a new effort to send up their huge G-l 6 booster, which is even larger than the U.S. Saturn 5. If it works, the Russian; could use it to erect a large space station, set up lunar bases and perhaps send off manned voyages to other planets.

Measured against such ambitious plans, Apollo-Soyuz may turn out to be only a small footnote in the history of space. But in the glow of last week's handclasp in the sky, the mission did serve to demonstrate that the rival superpowers can cooperate and succeed at extraordinarily difficult tasks.

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