One small handshake, one giant leap for future space collaboration, as things turned out (Image: NASA)
Everybody knows the space race was driven by cold war politics: without the Soviet Union and the US battling to outmanoeuvre each other, we wouldn’t have had Sputnik, Vostok or Apollo. But amid all the rhetoric and duplicity, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – a mission now almost forgotten – was able to unite the two space programmes via a brief window that opened in a wall of implacable ideological mistrust.
Today is the 40th anniversary of a key moment in the project, when capsules from both superpowers docked in orbit and their crews shook hands, exchanged gifts and then conducted experiments jointly. One of these involved positioning one spacecraft in the line with the sun to create a fake eclipse so they could take photos of the solar corona.
The project, which became known as “the handshake in space”, had seemed unachievable only a few years earlier during the Cuban missile crisis. How did it get off the ground?
“Both nations had lost astronauts and cosmonauts,” says Cathy Lewis, historian of international space programs at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and the curator of its Apollo-Soyuz permanent exhibit, Space Race. “The death of the crew of Soyuz 11 returning from the Salyut 1 space station in 1971 prompted a consensus that both sides required some sort of rescue feasibility.”
The idea originated at the UN and received a boost after 1971, when US president Richard Nixon and later his secretary of state Henry Kissinger were looking for projects to build the detente between the two countries. Two crews were selected: the Americans under the command of Thomas P. Stafford, the Russians under Alexei Leonov.
There were obstacles, especially with the proxy war in Vietnam still under way. “Both administrations were entirely mistrustful, with cold warriors on both sides,” says Lewis. “Even the civilian aerospace engineers grew up in a climate of mistrust. But once assigned to Apollo-Soyuz, being engineers, they found they spoke the same languages in many ways.”
There were practical challenges, too. Both sides had less than two decades of experience in space flight, and docking two spacecraft was difficult. Apollo used a pure oxygen atmosphere, whereas Soyuz used standard air. The crews couldn’t move between the two without a period of adjustment.
The solution was something called the androgynous docking adapter. “The adapter was essentially an airlock that would allow the crews to transition from the two atmospheres. And it was supposed to be built jointly,” says Lewis.
But it proved impossible for both sides to work on it simultaneously: they were too far apart geographically and pre-internet communications were too time-consuming. The adapter ended up being built in the US.
Lessons for today
Is there anything the mission can teach us given that relations between the US, European Union, and Russia still have flashpoints?
“Yes,” says Lewis. “There is the pragmatic point that this engineering feat became the basis on which, years down the line, all the signatories knew they could build the International Space Station. If you can do this simple project you can do the more advanced things.
“People from different ideologies worked side by side. It led, perhaps, to more openness. This was the first Soyuz launch televised live and announced in advance.”
The relationships between cosmonauts, astronauts and engineers have endured. At Mission Control in Korolyov, near Moscow, the room where they hosted their American counterparts is preserved as shrine to Apollo-Soyuz. Stafford and Leonov remain friends, and Leonov is godfather to Stafford’s two youngest children.
In fact, there is such respect between the two groups of former cold war enemies that, although a version of the Soyuz spacecraft has been displayed in Washington DC since 1976 as part of the Apollo-Soyuz exhibit, nobody at the museum has ever been inside it.
“Technically it is on loan so we’re not free to do that,” says Lewis. “It is a bit like breaking into somebody’s sarcophagus, or climbing on their artwork. We wouldn’t do it.”
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