Apollo-Soyuz at 50: The Cold War space hug that nearly ended in gasping horror It is 50 years since the last hurrah of the Apollo program, with a mission that saw the final launch of an Apollo vehicle, and a subsequent docking with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit. The mission was the first and only spaceflight of Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury 7 group of astronauts, who had been …
> On the Soviet side, the first spacewalker – Alexei Leonov – would command the two-person Soyuz crew on what would be his final spaceflight.
There's a film online that goes into that first space walk in detail called “The Spacewalker”. Their safe return was even more unlikly than Apollo 13.
> Leonov's suit swelled up in vacuum and he had great difficulty getting back into the Soyuz after his spacewalk.
He had to go in to the inflatable airlock headfirst and then wriggle round to close the outer hatch else he couldn't get back into the capsule.
Then the oxygen regulator in the capsule went faulty and he had to cut into the insulation to disconnect a valve.
Then they landed miles from the drop zone and almost froze to death. Except a ham radio operator picked up the homing signal and called the rescue people.
Space story, so shameless plug. The BBC World Service are adding another podcast to their 13 Minutes to the Moon series. 1 and 2 are brilliant, I've listened to them twice and they go into loads of detail - 1 being specifically on the process of landing on the Moon, and 2 being about how they pulled off the Apollo 13 recovery.
The new series has just started, and is on the Space Shuttle. But it's a different team to the other two. Not that I've any complaints with episode 1.
However I've also just learnt, in looking this up, that Kevin Fong and Andrew Luck-Baker (who wrote the first two) have their own podcast on the history of the Shuttle, called 16 Sunsets. So that's my lunchtime listening sorted.
Post lunch news. The first episode of 16 Sunsets was I think better (more focused) than the BBC's 13 Minutes series 3 first But they're doing different things and have interviewed different people. Plus used different interviews from the NASA oral history project. But I'm happy to have both.
Kevin Fong's interviews with John Aaron and Gerry Griffin from both this and the Apollo 13 series are a particular highlight.
Also I had brie on Ryvita followed by tea and speculoos cookies (that I bought at Christmas and have been unopened in the cupboard since. Which is probably much less interesting post-lunch news. But it was delicious.
I was in a small town in Illinois and my father told me to come outside and see something, he pointed up in the sky and kept looking at his watch and he said keep watching and then we saw something that looked like a star coming through the other stars, but it was moving. He said it was the Apollo Soyuz space mission and he said keep watching, and the spacecrafts split into two pieces. I had witnessed the Apollo Soyuz undocking in real time with my naked eye, and it was wonderful !!! I was about 11 years old. It was much more exciting than the moon landing video which was pretty grainy which I also watched live.
I'm almost exactly right there with you, except there's a conflict in my youthful memory of the time. The town in Illinois wasn't quite so small, maybe, but it was no Chicago; it was Champaign. Except while it seems about right that it would be Apollo-Soyuz, we had moved away from Champaign in April 1975 as far as I recall, so one memory or the other must be mistaken. I'd guess that it was some earlier mission. Based on it being warm outside in my memory, and probably in a year or so leading up to that April date, probably Skylab. Assuming that to be the case, I guess I don't have any direct first-hand memories of Apollo-Soyuz itself, I'm afraid. And I certainly don't remember seeing any undocking! Although decades later, I did see something special from the Space Shuttle/ISS.
