La missione Apollo-Sojuz: come hanno fatto i nemici della Guerra Fredda a costruire un ponte spaz...

Video from the channel Full Context about Apollo–Soyuz, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 22:59. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary from the Full Context channel that revisits the Apollo-Soyuz mission of July 1975 beyond the well-known photo of the handshake in orbit. It builds the story around three ideas: before the project, the spacecraft of the two countries could not dock with each other; the American crew suffered toxic exposure during re-entry; and the docking mechanism created for the mission left descendants still in use on the International Space Station.

It traces the space race from Sputnik (1957) and Gagarin's flight (1961) to the 1969 Moon landing, and the cuts that followed: the cancellation of Apollo 18, 19 and 20 and the shift towards Skylab and the shuttle. On the Soviet side, it recounts the four failures of the N1 lunar rocket and the opportunity a joint mission gave Moscow to present itself as a partner rather than a loser. It cites the film Marooned (1969) and the Apollo 13 accident (1970) as arguments in favour of a common docking and rescue standard. It explains the technical differences between the two spacecraft (Apollo used pure oxygen at low pressure and Soyuz a nitrogen-oxygen mixture at higher pressure) and the solution adopted: an androgynous system, the APAS, fitted to a docking module that served as an airlock.

It introduces the crew. Thomas Stafford was a veteran of Gemini 6A and Apollo 10. Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven, had been grounded by an arrhythmia; he was reinstated in 1972 and flew at the age of 51. The rest of the crew were Vance Brand, Alexei Leonov, who made the first spacewalk aboard Voskhod 2 in 1965 and had been slated to command the Soviet Moon landing, and Valeri Kubasov. The crews trained together for three years in Star City and Houston. Soyuz 19 lifted off from Baikonur on 15 July 1975, and Apollo followed seven and a half hours later. Stafford hand-flew the final approach, and the handshake took place above Metz. During about 47 hours of docked flight, the crews shared meals, repaired the Soyuz television camera, joined the two halves of a commemorative plaque and created an artificial eclipse to photograph the solar corona. The Soyuz landed on 21 July. On the 24th, during Apollo's re-entry, a misplaced switch let fumes of monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide into the cabin, and the three astronauts spent about two weeks hospitalised in Honolulu. The documentary closes with the legacy of the docking system, from Atlantis-Mir in 1995 to the ISS, and with the friendship between Stafford and Leonov, which lasted until Leonov's death in 2019.