Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov (left) and astronaut Deke Slayton (right) greet each other in space.
EAST MEETS WEST IN ORBIT
The year 1975 saw the first international cooperative venture in space when American astronauts, taking part in the final Apollo flight, docked in space with Soviet cosmonauts in a Soyuz craft. Although there was a scientific dimension to the mission that would prove useful in the future Shuttle-Mir program, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was largely a symbolic gesture of détente between the nations.
“Man this was worth waiting 16 years for,” said Deke Slayton, 51, as he blasted off with Tom Stafford and Vance Brand in the Saturn for the first international space mission. Slayton, one of the original Mercury 7, was making his first spaceflight, having been grounded for a heart murmur that was years afterward regarded as trivial.
Although the international mission, a docking between an Apollo and a Soyuz capsule, was mainly about goodwill, for the American crew it was still welcome, since it was clear that it would be many years before there would be another flight opportunity with the Space Shuttle which was under development.
Vance Brand, 44, was also on his first mission and was the Command Module pilot. He recalled:
At that time I’d just gotten off a backup assignment with Apollo 15, and I was a backup crewman on through the Skylab missions and very up to date on the Command Module and Service Module, things that would be used on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. I decided that I was interested enough that I attended some of the banquets that the Soviet cosmonauts were attending here. On my own, I went off, took Russian lessons. I paid for my own Russian lessons on Saturdays and got into their language and their culture a little bit.
When we got with the Soviets, they had their security monitors, and you could see that it was a less trusting, more closed society, but on the other hand, as human beings [they] that opened up more and more, I thought, in our relationships. We actually came to have a very close relationship with the Soviet crew.
In orbit, the two craft docked and, after their cabin atmospheres were equalized (the Apollo used low-pressure oxygen whereas the Soyuz used air at one atmosphere of pressure), the time came for the handshake in space and the exchange of gifts.
Brand: On the first transfer, Deke and Tom went into the Soyuz, and I stayed back in the Command Module, sort of minding the store, so to speak, holding the attitude for the stack of vehicles which consisted of Soyuz and Apollo and Docking Module. Tom and Deke went in, and, of course, there was a big greeting—and they went into the Soyuz, they had something to eat, signed some documents, and more or less made an international relations thing out of the first visit. Then later we had other transfers back and forth. I went over on one, and I was in the Soyuz for four and a half hours. Valeri Kubasov and I were together in Soyuz. Aleksei Leonov, on the other hand, was visiting Tom and Deke in our spacecraft. We couldn’t freely go back and forth because of the airlock in between.
After the final undocking, they went to a lower orbit and speeded up and went ahead of us. We had tried to play a little joke on them at that point. Before the mission, on the ground, I had made a tape at home, and my daughter Stephanie and a friend helped me make it. We turned on shower water. They weren’t in a shower, but it sounded like it. Both girls were about 18 or 19 years old, and so they made a lot of noise, which made it sound like somebody was in a shower just having a ball, a lot of giggling and stuff. So after the Russians were ahead of us, oh, 3 or 400 miles, and we had watched them go out ahead of us and probably tracked them a little bit, why, we played this tape over the VHF communications, which both spacecraft had, and we said: “Hey, we’re having a ball here,” and then we played this noise … And there were all these female voices and stuff. So I’m not sure that they heard that tape, actually, because after the mission Alexei was asked and he didn’t act like he knew about it, but we tried, anyway, to play a little joke on them.
There were problems during the flight. Stafford forgot to turn off a switch and he flooded a cooling system. This meant that instead of staying constant, the temperature would swing erratically in the capsule. There was also the remote possibility that if the ice had expanded enough, it would have punched a hole in the cabin and they would have died. While performing the docking, Deke Slayton hit a jet control handle and caused the command search module to yaw, and almost broke the docking interface.
It was also reported that Vance Brand forgot to throw two switches on the Earth landing system. The Apollo crew always wanted to operate these manually so that the parachutes did not deploy in orbit. The switches had to be thrown at 12,200 meters (40,000 feet). Throwing the switches shuts off the hydrazine thrusters that are firing to keep the Command Module stable. Because they remain firing, the pressure equalization that automatically sucks in air when the pressure outside gets greater than the pressure inside, also sucked in poisonous and highly corrosive nitrogen tetroxide.
Brand: Nitrogen tetroxide is really a bad chemical to breathe because when it sees the moisture in your lungs, it turns into an acid. So we realized that we’d been gassed. I was right next to the vent, so I passed out momentarily after we got on the water, and Tom had us all put on oxygen masks. Then I came to, and we knew we needed to get the hatch open, to get fresh air in the cabin, but we weren’t real quick to do that because we wanted to make sure the docking collar was around the spacecraft. We didn’t want any water in the cabin. Eventually we got the hatch open and fresh air. We told the docs we thought we’d had some gas, so they checked us out. Sure enough, they could see it on our lungs, and so we were in the hospital on sort of a lung treatment protocol that was very good. It actually eventually reduced the irritation in our lungs, and I guess within two weeks I was jogging, and I haven’t had any effects since then. So it was a nominal entry, except for that.
Afterward, the flight controllers had the two switches mounted on a piece of walnut with a little brass plaque. I’m told that Vance Brand still has them on his wall at home.
The mission was a success, and was the only time an American and Soviet spacecraft docked. When the Space Shuttle docked with the Mir space station for the first time in 1995, the USSR no longer existed.
After all the failures and catastrophes of the Soviet lunar program and the Soyuz accidents, the USSR only slowly exorcised the demons of its space program. In 1977 Salyut 6 would finally put the Soviet space program on the slow track to success, hosting 16 crews, four of which set absolute endurance records for time in space, significantly exceeding the 84-day record set by NASA’s Skylab 4 crew during 1973–4. Space docking, and supply and refueling, were developed to be routine. There were no fatalities, and in rescuing one of their space stations, Salyut 7, the Soviets pulled off one of the most remarkable feats in the history of spaceflight.
TIMELINE
| 1975 | 15 July US astronauts Deke Slayton, Tom Stafford and Vance Brand blast off in an Apollo spacecraft, following Soviet cosmonauts Valeri Kubasov and Aleksei Leonov being launched in a Soyuz spacecraft |
| 17 July The Apollo and Soyuz craft dock in space and the crews transfer between them for a time—the first such linkup | |
| 19 July The linked US and Soviet spacecraft separate | |
| 24 July The Apollo spacecraft splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean |