_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [84]
But world peace and possibly Earth’s survival itself were riding on the Apollo-Soyuz mission scheduled for the summer of 1975. The goal was critical for every American and Russian. Until now, any crew marooned in space with limited oxygen and power would have been lost. With the universal docking equipment being built for Apollo-Soyuz, chances of a future rescue would be almost certain.
For three years the Americans and Russians, supported by backup teams of engineers and space veterans, modified their spaceships, built new needed equipment, learned their respective languages, and practiced orbital flight maneuvers in new simulators.
The barriers came down. Russian and American suspicions waned. When cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov found themselves at Mission Control in Texas, and at Cape Canaveral’s launch pads in Florida, they eagerly waited to fly the astronauts to their Baikonur launch site to watch their big rockets thunder into the sky. In between forging the equipment needed and training to fly what they had created, there were three years of friendship-building with hot dogs and beer, borscht and vodka, swimming in the Florida surf, and wild snowball fights in the cosmonauts’ playground in Star City.
Slowly the pieces of the international puzzle came together. The Apollo-Soyuz teams were each firm in trusting their own equipment. Now they had gained trust in a never-flown international spaceship. Once Apollo and Soyuz were joined high above Earth, the tunnel formed by the common docking module would pressurize, hatches would open, and men who had been near enemies but now were close friends would form a union in space.
For Deke Slayton it would not be the moon, but it would be space, and what happened in the hard vacuum of Earth orbit would begin the melt of the cold war far below.
EIGHTEEN
A Handshake in Space
On the fifteenth day of July 1975, according to the best intelligence available, some 200,000 rockets built for war were in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. Many were small, shoulder-fired weapons. Others were clustered aboard armored vehicles. Still more were slung beneath the wings or within the bomb bays of fighters and bombers. Hundreds of war rockets were ready to pop from beneath the sea from the missile tubes of nuclear submarines. They could race up to four thousand miles to their target while thousands of silo-buried heavy missiles, some as tall as a ten-story building, were ready to launch with up to ten thermonuclear warheads, each destined for individual targets within a given spray on any distant continent. Never in history had our planet been so threatened by its dominant species.
On that day, only two of those rockets carried humans instead of means of destruction. The first off its launch pad was to be Russia’s Soyuz 19. It was to be followed six hours later by America’s Saturn 1B with the Apollo. The two ships were to rendezvous in space for a handshake—a meeting of friendship and understanding; but more important, if it was a good day, it would be the beginning of the end for the massive nuclear threat.
Détente, the diplomats were calling it. Richard Nixon had created it. The world was listening and watching. Its inhabitants were staring at the first live television ever broadcast from Russia’s launch pads on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
“Launch is ready,” the loudspeakers blared.
Soyuz 19 and its rocket’s internal systems were alive.
“Tri…
“Dva…
“Odin…
“Zashiganiye!”
In Florida, happy NASA officials awoke Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand: “Your friends are upstairs. Right on schedule.”
Soyuz 19 was coming around the planet on its fourth trip when the American crew climbed aboard their rocket and spaceship. This was the last Saturn 1B booster, and the last Apollo in the stable.
“Aleksei and Valeri, from Apollo,” Commander Tom Stafford called Soyuz. “We’ll be up there shortly.”
Saturn 1B came to life. Flame spewed in sheets over the launch platform, and