The Apollo Soyuz Mission | When 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.

NASA film, shot and edited in 1975, about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint space mission of the United States and the Soviet Union. It mixes real communications between crews and control centres with narration that follows the mission: the two launches, the orbital approach, the docking, the transfers between spacecraft, the joint experiments, the Soyuz landing and the Apollo splashdown.

The footage is from July 1975. On 15 July the Soyuz lifted off from the Baikonur complex in Kazakhstan, and hours later the Apollo left Launch Pad B at the Kennedy Space Center, on the last flight of an Apollo-Saturn. After about 40 hours of approach manoeuvres, the spacecraft docked at about 140 miles (around 225 km) altitude over the Atlantic, near Portugal. The Soyuz landed in Soviet Central Asia and the Apollo splashed down in the Pacific, west of Hawaii, where it was recovered by the USS New Orleans.

The mission crowned the space agreement signed in Moscow in 1972 and more than three years of preparation. It was led by directors Glynn Lunney and Konstantin Bushuyev. Each country built its half of a compatible docking system with a common interface, intended as a standard for future dockings and rescues. The American crew comprised Thomas Stafford, commander and veteran of Apollo 10; Deke Slayton, one of the original seven astronauts, grounded by an arrhythmia and reinstated in 1972; and Vance Brand, on his first flight. On the Soviet side were Alexei Leonov, who made the first spacewalk aboard Voskhod 2 in 1965, and Valeri Kubasov, who had carried out the first weightless welding experiments aboard Soyuz 6. During the two days of joint flight there was an exchange of flags and messages from Brezhnev and the US president. The crews conducted materials experiments in a furnace, simulated a solar eclipse to photograph the corona, and measured ultraviolet absorption in the upper atmosphere. They then docked a second time. The Apollo continued flying alone with the rest of its 27 experiments. During re-entry, gas from the attitude-control thrusters entered the cabin and the crew had to be hospitalised in Hawaii. The film presents the mission as the close of the Apollo programme and the forerunner of later cooperation with the shuttle and Spacelab.