The Most Important Handshake In History: The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

Video from the channel Progress - Science Documentaries about Apollo–Soyuz, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 54:03. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the mission in which, on July 17, 1975, astronaut Thomas Stafford and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov shook hands in orbit, about 225 kilometers above Earth, before an audience of roughly a billion viewers. It combines archival footage with interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, engineers and technicians from both countries, and reviews the political negotiations, the technical work, the relationship between the crews and the development of the flight, including Apollo's troubled return.

The documentary starts from the meeting of American and Soviet troops on the banks of the Elbe in April 1945 and traces the Cold War and the space race: Sputnik, Laika, Gagarin, Tereshkova and Apollo's landing on the Moon in 1969. With the détente of the early 1970s, Richard Nixon's visit to Moscow in May 1972 and the strategic arms limitation agreements, the two countries agreed on a joint experimental flight for 1975, with a common docking system between their spacecraft.

The mission was presented to the public at the 1973 Le Bourget air show. Stafford, a veteran of Apollo 10, would command Apollo together with Vance Brand and Deke Slayton, sidelined years earlier by a heart condition; Leonov, the first man to walk in space in March 1965, would command Soyuz with Valeri Kubasov. The crews had about three years to prepare for the flight, amid mutual visits, surveillance by the KGB and the CIA, and concerns over technology transfer.

To overcome the language barrier, each crew ended up speaking the other's language, more slowly and clearly. The difference in atmosphere between the spacecraft had to be solved with an airlock, and an identical docking mechanism was designed on both sides, with guide petals and a collar that absorbed the impact. Stafford demanded to see the real Soyuz, and on April 28, 1975, his crew became the first Americans to visit Baikonur.

On July 15, 1975, Soyuz launched first, in the first Soviet launch broadcast live, and seven hours and twenty minutes later Apollo launched atop a Saturn IB from Cape Canaveral. After 44 hours of pursuit, the spacecraft docked, remained joined for two days and exchanged visits, experiments, gifts and the first international press conference from space, with messages from Leonid Brezhnev and Gerald Ford. During Apollo's reentry, a communications failure caused a checklist step to be skipped, and nitrogen tetroxide fumes entered the cabin; Brand lost consciousness and Stafford revived him with oxygen. The mission ended on July 24, 1975, in the Pacific, and the three astronauts spent two weeks hospitalized. The documentary presents the flight as the origin of later cooperation in Shuttle-Mir and the International Space Station.