Stafford and Leonov shake hands through an open hatch; American and Soviet spacecraft dock in orbit
By the summer of 1975, the United States and the Soviet Union had spent thirty years pointing weapons at each other, but détente had opened a strange new possibility: cooperation in orbit. On July 15, Soyuz 19 launched from Baikonur carrying Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov; six and a half hours later, Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Deke Slayton followed aboard the final Apollo spacecraft ever built. Two days later, on July 17, the two craft docked at 16:19 UTC, and Stafford and Leonov shook hands through an open hatch. It was the last flight of both Apollo and the Saturn rocket family, closing out an era by opening another.
Apollo-Soyuz was America's last Apollo flight, and NASA chose to end that program not with another moon landing but with a handshake in orbit, betting that cooperation photographed better than competition. The docking hardware and procedures worked out here became the direct ancestor of Shuttle-Mir and the International Space Station, the framework America still uses to fly with Russia.
QWhat drink did the astronauts request be waiting for them after splashdown?
The Apollo crew radioed down a request: "Tell Joe we want it up here," referring to the Link-Up cocktail, a drink created specially for the mission by Joe Gilmore, head bartender at The Savoy Hotel's American Bar in London. The cocktail had been designed to mark the joint flight before the astronauts had even left Earth, and the crew apparently didn't want to wait to try it. It's a small detail, but it captures how thoroughly the mission had already become a cultural event on both sides of the Atlantic before it even splashed down.
QHow long were the two spacecraft actually locked together?
Precisely 1 day, 23 hours, seven minutes, and three seconds, though the crews spent 44 hours together across two separate dockings. After the first undocking, Apollo repositioned to block the sun, creating an artificial eclipse so the Soyuz crew could photograph the solar corona, an experiment that required a second brief docking before the spacecraft finally separated for good. The precision of that timestamp says something about how meticulously both space agencies tracked every second of the joint mission.
QWhat went wrong during Apollo's final descent to Earth?
Unignited reaction control system propellant, specifically toxic monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, vented from the spacecraft and got sucked into a cabin air intake during reentry. Vance Brand briefly lost consciousness from the fumes. Thomas Stafford, still functioning, retrieved emergency oxygen masks, fitted one onto Brand, and handed another to Deke Slayton. It was the one serious mishap in an otherwise smooth mission, and it happened after the hard part, the actual docking in orbit, was already behind them.
