The Apollo Soyuz Test Project ~ Indiana National History Day

Video from the channel Kaylee Kern about Apollo–Soyuz, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 9:57. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A school project prepared for the Indiana state contest of National History Day that reviews the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP): its political origins, the joint preparation of the crews, the flight and its legacy. It intersperses interviews with historians Asif Siddiqi, of Fordham University, and Jeffrey Mauck.

It places the mission at the end of the space race, which began with Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 and reached its milestone with Apollo 11's arrival on the Moon on July 20, 1969. It links the project to détente: the SALT talks and the ABM and SALT treaties that Nixon and Brezhnev signed in Moscow on May 26, 1972. It attributes the idea of cooperating to NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine, who proposed it to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The Apollo crew was made up of Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Donald Slayton, and the Soviet crew of Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov. Each team learned the other's language, and there were visits to Star City and to Houston. On July 15, 1975, Soyuz 19 lifted off from Baikonur, and about seven hours later Apollo did so atop a Saturn IB from Cape Canaveral. Two days later the spacecraft docked, the hatches were opened and the commanders shook hands. The crews ate together, exchanged plaques, badges and tree seeds, and received calls from Brezhnev and Gerald Ford. After the final undocking on July 19, Soyuz 19 landed on the 21st and Apollo splashed down on the 24th in the Pacific, where it was recovered by the USS New Orleans. The video presents the Shuttle-Mir program as one of the mission's heirs.