The Handshake

Part of the Dare Mighty Things series — Apollo | Estimated read time: 6 minutes

Consider what was being proposed.

It was 1970. The United States and the Soviet Union had spent the previous twenty-five years pointing nuclear weapons at each other, building competing missile programs, running competing space programs, and competing for influence across every continent on Earth. They had come within days of nuclear war in 1962. Their ideological conflict had killed tens of thousands of people in Korea and was currently killing tens of thousands more in Vietnam. Their intelligence agencies operated against each other continuously, and their governments communicated with a mix of suspicion and contempt.

And someone — on both sides, simultaneously — thought it might be a good idea to build a door between their spacecraft and see if they could get men from each country to float through it and shake hands.

The proposal was not a joke. It was not a public relations exercise that nobody expected actually to happen. In May 1972, President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev signed an agreement formalizing the mission. Engineers from both programs began working to figure out how to connect two spacecraft designed by two entirely different countries, with entirely different engineering philosophies, in entirely different languages, without either side trusting the other enough to hand over their blueprints simply.

The mission was called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. It flew in July 1975. It was the last Apollo mission ever flown.

And it worked.

The Problem Nobody Had Solved Before

The engineering challenge of Apollo-Soyuz was not glamorous, but it was genuinely hard — and understanding it reveals something important about what the mission actually required of both sides.

The two spacecraft were incompatible in almost every meaningful way.

Apollo operated in a pure oxygen atmosphere at roughly one-third of normal atmospheric pressure. Soyuz operated in a mixed oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere at full atmospheric pressure — the same air composition as Earth at sea level. If a cosmonaut floated directly from Soyuz into Apollo, the pressure difference would cause decompression sickness — the same condition that kills deep-sea divers who surface too quickly. It could be fatal.

The docking mechanisms were different. The communications systems were different. The navigation references were different. Even the languages were different — before training began, none of the Americans spoke Russian. None of the cosmonauts spoke English, and both crews needed to be able to communicate in each other's spacecraft in an emergency.

The solution to the atmospheric problem was a specially designed Docking Module — a pressurized airlock built in the United States and attached to the Apollo spacecraft that could serve as a transition chamber. A crewmember moving from Soyuz to Apollo would enter the docking module, wait while the pressure and gas composition slowly adjusted, and then proceed through the inner hatch. It added time and complexity to every crew transfer, but it worked.

The solution to the language problem was simpler: everyone just learned both. The Americans learned Russian. The cosmonauts learned English. In practice, they found that the best approach was for the Russians to speak English and the Americans to speak Russian — each crew communicating in the language they were less fluent in, which meant everyone was paying close attention. Nobody could claim they hadn't understood.

Alexei Leonov — the Soviet commander, already famous as the first human being to walk in space during the Voskhod 2 mission in 1965 — noticed that Tom Stafford's Russian had developed a distinctive quality. It was grammatically correct, comprehensible, and delivered with such a pronounced Oklahoma drawl that it sounded like no Russian anyone had ever spoken before. Leonov later joked that Apollo-Soyuz was conducted in three languages: Russian, English, and Oklahomski.

The People Who Made It Possible

Tom Stafford was the right commander for this mission in ways that went beyond his substantial qualifications. He had flown four times — Gemini 6, Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and now this. He was methodical, experienced, and possessed of a personality that could find common ground with almost anyone.

He and Leonov became genuine friends — not the performed friendship of diplomats executing a policy decision, but something that developed through years of joint training visits, of learning each other's language and culture, of eating together and laughing together and arguing about spacecraft design in rooms where the translators sometimes had to catch up. Leonov was gregarious, creative, and a talented artist who would later paint scenes from the mission from memory. Stafford was more reserved, more procedural, but no less committed. The two men remained close for the rest of their lives.

The third American on the mission was Deke Slayton — one of the original Mercury Seven, grounded fourteen years earlier by a heart condition before he could fly his Mercury mission, and now finally getting to space at age 51 on the last Apollo flight ever launched. His presence on the crew was partly sentimental and partly earned — he had spent those fourteen years running NASA's astronaut office, assigning crews, shaping the program from the inside. It was appropriate, in a way that transcended symbolism, that he was on the final one.

The Soviet crew flew from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 15, 1975. The Apollo launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida seven and a half hours later — the orbital mechanics required the staggered launch to allow the two spacecraft to arrive in compatible orbits. Both launches were flawless.

July 17, 1975

Two days after launch, the Apollo spacecraft maneuvered toward the Soyuz, and a hard dock was achieved at 12:12 in the afternoon, Eastern time. The two spacecraft were now a single connected object traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, 140 miles above the Earth.

Three hours passed while the crews pressurized and equalized the docking module.

Then Stafford opened the Apollo hatch into the docking module. Leonov opened the Soyuz hatch from the other side.

"Come in here and shake hands," Stafford said.

Leonov floated through.

"Very happy, my friend!" Stafford replied — in Russian, with his Oklahoma drawl intact.

The handshake was broadcast live on television to audiences across both countries and around the world. During the first crew exchange, both crews received a statement from Brezhnev and a phone call from President Gerald Ford. The spacecraft docked over the city of Metz in France — a delay had shifted it from the originally calculated point over the British seaside resort of Bognor Regis.

Over the next two days, the crews moved between spacecraft, ate meals together, conducted joint scientific experiments, exchanged gifts — flags and tree seeds to be planted in their respective countries — and signed a document they called the Space Magna Carta, certifying it as the first international space docking. They listened to each other's music. They gave each other tours of their capsules. They assembled a commemorative plaque in orbit, each half having launched on a different spacecraft from a different country.

It was, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.

The docking lasted forty-seven hours. When the spacecraft finally separated and went their own ways — Soyuz landing in Kazakhstan on July 21, Apollo splashing down in the Pacific on July 24 — the mission was judged a complete success, technically and diplomatically.

The only serious problem occurred during Apollo's reentry, when a vent was accidentally left open, allowing toxic fumes from the spacecraft's thrusters to enter the cabin. All three astronauts felt their eyes and throats burning. Vance Brand briefly lost consciousness. Stafford retrieved oxygen masks and got them on his crewmates in time. All three were hospitalized for two weeks after splashdown, but recovered fully. It was, as these things sometimes are, a reminder that spaceflight remained spaceflight regardless of what it symbolized.

What It Was, and What It Wasn't

Apollo-Soyuz did not end the Cold War. It did not resolve the fundamental ideological conflict between the two superpowers. The Soviet Union would not collapse for another sixteen years, and the years between 1975 and 1991 included significant episodes of renewed tension — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the proxy conflicts of three continents.

But it planted something. The specific docking adapter system developed for Apollo-Soyuz — the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System, or APAS — was not abandoned after the mission. It was refined and improved. It would eventually become the basis for the Shuttle-Mir docking program in the 1990s, when American Space Shuttles began docking with the Russian Mir space station. And the APAS docking collar is still in use today — the first module connecting the Russian and American segments of the International Space Station uses the direct descendant of the hardware built for a mission in 1975.

The handshake in space over Metz, France, was not the end of anything. It was not a solution. It was a proof of concept — a demonstration that two countries whose governments were deeply hostile to each other could, at the level of engineers, astronauts, and mission controllers, find a way to work together. That they could build a door between their spacecraft and agree on what would happen when it opened.

Twenty years later, almost to the day, American astronaut Hoot Gibson and Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov shook hands in the hatchway between a Space Shuttle and the Mir space station. The gesture was familiar by then. The cooperation it represented was routine by 1995.

None of it would have happened without the proof of concept — the last Apollo mission, the most unlikely thing the program ever attempted, the handshake at 140 miles above the city of Metz.

Apollo ended not with a landing, but with a door opening.

Which, if you think about it, is a better ending anyway.

This article is part of the Dare Mighty Things series — Apollo branch.

• [→ Next: The Space Shuttle and the ISS — why America pivoted, and what it built next]

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