In 1975, a meet-up between American and Soviet spacefarers in orbit showed that the superpowers could work together. Its positive effects eventually led to the International Space Station (ISS).
At just 33, Glynn Lunney was one of Nasa’s most experienced flight directors. By 1970, he had been at the heart of the action for everything from the Apollo capsule’s first orbit to Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps on the Moon.
Months after helping to lead efforts to save the crew of Apollo 13 when their spacecraft exploded, Lunney was preparing for his next lunar mission. Then he got a phone call from his boss, head of mission control, Chris Kraft.
“He said ‘Glynn, start getting ready to go to Moscow, you’re going to be there in a couple of weeks’,” said Lunney. “It was an out-of-the-blue complete surprise, a stunner to me.”
Having devoted his career to winning the space race against the Soviet Union, Lunney was now expected to lead a team to work alongside his Cold War opponents on a joint mission: the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The aim was to dock a US Apollo capsule and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit. Realising that plan would take Lunney the next five years.
Lunney died in 2021, but I was fortunate enough to interview him in 2012 for a BBC radio programme on the Moon landings. We met in Houston’s famous Apollo Mission Control Room. The retired flight director sat beside me in his old chair – looking down over dark consoles and the blank main display screens. At the time (it has since been restored), the room felt neglected, the missions a distant memory.
Our conversation was meant to be about the challenge of landing on the Moon, questions he had answered numerous times before. But once Lunney got talking about Apollo-Soyuz, it was clear that this rarely discussed mission was a career highlight.
“I viewed myself as having gone from a Cold War warrior, in terms of getting our programme to the Moon first, to one who was sent to try to see what we could do to cooperate [in space],” he said. “I was just 33 years old when I went to Moscow for the first time, representing the United States and I was thinking, ‘Wow!’”
The Soviet Union and United States had been competing in space since the launch of Sputnik-1 in 1957. But the idea of the world’s two superpowers working together did not come completely out of the blue.
“There was an agreement [about exchanging meteorological data] signed between the US and the Soviet Union in October of 1962, and if you know about October of 1962, it was also the Cuban Missile Crisis when we came closer to nuclear war than ever before in history,” says Muir-Harmony. “The space race was always this combination of cooperation and competition.”
By the 1970s, the Nixon White House was keen to reduce international tensions with the Soviet Union led by Leonid Brezhnev (the administration also opened-up dialogue with communist China) so Apollo-Soyuz was important diplomatically. But the endeavour had a very practical purpose – if spacecraft from different nations could dock with each other, they might be used to save stranded astronauts.
“The question was, how do you rescue each other’s crews in space?” says Kenneth Phillips, curator for aerospace science at the California Science Center. “It was a noble idea that space exploration and collaboration bind us together.”
When it came to astronauts assigned to the mission, the symbolism of the selection was also significant. The three-man US crew would include Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Grounded since 1962 because of a suspected heart condition, Slayton had finally been cleared to fly after watching from the sidelines as the other astronauts pioneered spaceflight and flew to the Moon. The two-man Soviet crew, meanwhile, would be led by Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. If Russia’s giant N1 Moon rocket had been successful, Leonov was slated to become the first man to walk on the Moon. (BBC)
The handshake that made the Intl Space Station
