Word: soyuz
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Stafford and Slayton crawled into the Soyuz and shook hands and exchanged bear hugs with Leonov and his fellow crewman, Valery Kubasov. Then they traded gifts, including flags and commemorative plaques; Leonov, a gifted amateur painter, gave the astronauts sketches he had done of them. After some small talk the four, plus Astronaut Vance Brand back in Apollo, sat back to listen to greetings from their national leaders. Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, in a message relayed by mission controllers outside Moscow, hailed the meeting in space as marking a "new page in the history of research." President Ford, sitting...
Soggy Borsch. Their first act of showbiz détente out of the way, the astronauts and cosmonauts settled down to other activities, including a meal four of them shared aboard Soyuz; Stafford bolted down three tubes of soggy borsch, only to resort to three Lomotil pills later. Soon it was show time again; as the lights and TV cameras clicked on for a joint press conference, the crews answered questions relayed from newsmen in Houston and Moscow. Leonov, fielding a question about the relative merits of Soviet and American space food, proved himself a deft diplomat. Said...
...time the spacecraft parted company on Saturday, the two teams of spacemen had spent some 44 hours linked together. As Apollo pulled away, it blotted out Soyuz's view of the sun, creating an artificial solar eclipse that the cosmonauts photographed for astronomers. The ships then redocked briefly in a retest of the docking system, but this time the hatches remained closed. Before long the ships separated for the last time. As Soyuz pulled ahead under a gentle thrust from its rockets, the spacemen bade each other a final radio farewell. "Mission accomplished," said Leonov. "Good show," said Stafford...
...went according to plan, Soyuz would spend another day and a half in space before landing July 21 under its single large parachute in the deserts of Kazakhstan, east of the Russians' Baikonur launch site. The Apollo crewmen, whose ship has far greater fuel and oxygen capacity than the smaller Soyuz, planned to stay in orbit another three days after the Russians landed, to conduct a series of experiments...
...where Moscow, in a sharp reversal of past practices, gave the mission prolonged press buildup and provided extensive live coverage in an apparent effort to dramatize detente to the Soviet man in the street (see box next page). Outside the U.S. and the Soviet Union, admiration of the Apollo-Soyuz flight was sometimes mixed with doubts about its diplomatic implications. Echoing a concern often heard in France, as well as in some Third World countries, that détente means that Washington and Moscow are building a condominium of world power, the Paris daily Le Figaro posed a question: "Would...