_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [85]
They punched through Max Q and then shot upward like a frightened jackrabbit until the rockets’ roar and the high-pitched howl of air ripping past them vanished. The teeth-jarring ride was suddenly over. But only for a second. Explosive charges blew apart the two stages, and then the second stage fired and took dead aim at that small doughnut in space—that small rendezvous target they had to pass through to settle them on that orbital track they would need to meet Soyuz 19.
They made it, and Deke Slayton shouted, “I love it! Damn, I love it. It sure as hell was worth waiting sixteen years.”
“You liked that, huh, Deke?” Tom Stafford grinned.
“I would like to make that ride about once a day,” the fifty-one-year-old rookie laughed as he suddenly felt the marvelous and strange feeling of weightlessness. “Yowee! I’ve never felt so free,” he yelled again.
Stafford and Brand shared the enjoyment. But they had work to do, and they quickly shed their cumbersome spacesuits, climbed into their flight coveralls, and readied Apollo to execute the maneuvers needed to meet the Russian ship.
Vance Brand tuned in Soyuz’s frequency. Speaking in Russian, he said, “Miy nakhoditswya na orbite!”
They heard Valeri Kubasov answer in English: “Very well. Hello, everybody.”
“Hello, Valeri,” Deke spoke in Russian. “How are you?”
“How are you? Good day!” Kubasov replied.
“Excellent!” Deke boomed. “I’m very happy.”
Aleksei Leonov’s voice came on. “Apollo, Soyuz, how do you read me?”
“I read you excellently,” Deke answered. He wasn’t the most loquacious astronaut up there, but who in hell cared? That wasn’t the point; he was in orbit, and it was time for the hunt to begin.
Tom Stafford took the controls of Apollo and fired the first of several rocket-thruster maneuvers needed to track down Soyuz during the next two days. They were playing a celestial game of tag, and they were having a ball. Circling in a lower orbit and making precise course-correction burns, Apollo gradually caught up with Soyuz high over the French city of Metz, where they performed an orbital ballet for a worldwide television audience. Apollo relayed pictures of Soyuz glowing green in a brilliant sun against the blackness of space and the azure of Earth’s oceans below.
With a slight shudder, while traveling at 17,400 miles per hour, Tom Stafford docked Apollo with Soyuz. “We have capture,” Stafford reported.
“Well done, Tom,” the Soyuz commander told Apollo’s commander. The two were destined to be generals in their respective air forces, but more important, they would become good friends. “Soyuz and Apollo are shaking hands,” Leonov added.
Throughout the world, television audiences watched as the astronauts and cosmonauts cleared the hatches between their respective ships and floated in the weightlessness from one spacecraft to the other.
“Friend,” Stafford called out as he shook hands with Leonov.
“Very, very happy to see you. How are things?” Leonov asked, reaching out to give Stafford and Slayton the traditional Russian bear hug.
The two crews exchanged gifts before gathering around a green table in Soyuz for a meal and a toast to their success. They feasted on reconstituted strawberries, cheese, apple and plum sticks, and tubes of borscht the cosmonauts had mischievously labeled vodka. Later, aboard Apollo, it was potato soup, bread, more strawberries, and grilled steak.
During the forty-seven hours the two ships were