The Apollo–Soyuz Mission | Rivals United in Space

Video from the channel Cosmo about Apollo–Soyuz, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 29:10. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

Official film that follows the Apollo-Soyuz mission from start to finish. It begins with the Soyuz countdown at Baikonur, which reached orbit in under nine minutes, and with the launch of the Apollo from Kennedy Space Center, the last flight of an Apollo Saturn. Before the three-hour mark, the Apollo extracts the docking module from the second stage and spends about 40 hours approaching the Soyuz. It introduces the crews: Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space with Voskhod 2 in 1965; Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10; Deke Slayton, returned to flight status in 1972 after a heart problem and docking module pilot; Valeri Kubasov, who carried out the first welding experiments on Soyuz 6, and Vance Brand, command module pilot on his first flight. It shows the docking at about 140 miles above the Atlantic, near Portugal, the transfers between spacecraft, the messages from Leonid Brezhnev and the US president, the exchange of flags, the FAI certificates and the joint dinner.

It combines 1975 footage from Baikonur, Cape Canaveral, the Moscow and Houston control centers, onboard television and the recovery of both spacecraft. The Soyuz lands in Soviet Central Asia and the Apollo splashes down in the Pacific, west of Hawaii, where it is recovered by the USS New Orleans.

The mission capped more than three years of preparation led by Glynn Lunney and Konstantin Bushuyev, following the space agreement signed in Moscow in 1972, which aimed at a universal docking system. The film reviews the experiments: an artificial solar eclipse in which the Apollo blocks the Sun's disk so the Soyuz can photograph the corona; ultraviolet absorption to measure oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere; a furnace for alloys; killifish, and the discovery of extreme ultraviolet sources. It also recounts that, during reentry, attitude-thruster gases entered the cabin and the crew was kept under observation in Hawaii. It closes by presenting the shuttle and the European Spacelab as heirs to this cooperation.