In July 1975 an American spacecraft and a Soviet one met in orbit on purpose. Fifteen years of a space race conducted as a proxy for everything else ended with Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand flying the last Apollo ever built to a rendezvous with Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov aboard Soyuz 19 — a mission whose entire product was the handshake at the end of it.
The engineering problem was a good metaphor for the politics. The two ships breathed incompatible atmospheres — Apollo ran low-pressure pure oxygen, Soyuz a near sea-level mix — so a purpose-built docking module had to be flown up as an airlock between them, along with an androgynous docking mechanism designed so that neither side was the passive partner. Crews spent years learning each other's languages; Stafford's Russian carried such a thick Oklahoma accent that Leonov cheerfully classified it as a third language, Oklahomski.
The hatch opened on 17 July over western Europe, and Stafford and Leonov shook hands on television while their governments watched. There were gifts, joint plaques, a shared meal, and a small piece of theatre from Leonov, who produced tubes labelled as borscht and, when his guests drank, revealed vodka labels pasted on the outside — the tubes actually held soup. The two commanders remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
For Deke Slayton the flight was a private vindication. One of the original Mercury Seven, he had been grounded in 1962 by an erratic heartbeat and had spent thirteen years choosing which of his colleagues flew while never flying himself. He finally reached orbit at 51, the oldest rookie in the world.
The return very nearly killed them. During descent the reaction-control thrusters were left firing and sucked toxic nitrogen tetroxide into the cabin; the crew were choking as they hit the water, Brand briefly lost consciousness, and Stafford dragged out oxygen masks and clamped one over his face. All three spent two weeks in hospital in Honolulu. It was the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft and the last time Americans flew in space for nearly six years — an ending that was also, deliberately, a beginning.
