The Flight of Apollo-Soyuz: 40th Anniversary

Video from the channel NASA about Apollo–Soyuz, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 12:23. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Commemorative NASA piece for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, presented by Bill Barry, the agency's chief historian. It opens aboard the International Space Station, where Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko were then in the middle of a one-year mission, and looks back at the first joint flight between the United States and the Soviet Union, with mission footage and testimony from those who took part.

In mid-July 1975, an Apollo and a Soyuz docked about 140 miles above the Atlantic, near Portugal. The mission capped more than three years of preparation in the midst of the Cold War, when both countries had thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other. The crews trained together for two years and ended up communicating in a mix of languages they called "Russlish." Deke Slayton is recalled, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, grounded for medical reasons, who finally flew to space on this mission.

During the two days of joint flight, astronauts and cosmonauts moved from one spacecraft to the other, carried out experiments and tested the compatible rendezvous and docking system, conceived as a possible standard for rescue missions. The participants recount anecdotes such as the drawings Leonov made of Stafford or the borscht cans labeled as vodka. After undocking, redocking and finally separating, the spacecraft moved apart. The piece presents the mission as the origin of later cooperation in Shuttle-Mir and on the International Space Station.