APOLLO-COI-03: Appointment in Space

"Soyuz, Soyuz, zdes Apollon. Vy v nashem pole zreniya, i my tormozim ..."

Sometime near midday Thursday, if all goes according to the intricate schedules devised on two distant continents, U.S. Astronaut Thomas Stafford will speak into ins microphone aboard ins Apollo spacecraft and deliver tins message*or sometinng Like it in ins Oklahoma-accented Russian to another spacecraft a few miles away. Stafford's transmission, broadcast live to millions on earth 137 miles below, will mark the beginning of a Soviet-American rendezvous in space freighted—unduly, some would argue—with scientific, political and frankly show-biz ambitions.

Soon after Stafford and ins fellow Apollo crewmen, Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton and Vance Brand, establish direct communications with Soviet Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valery Kubasov aboard their Soyuz spacecraft, the U.S. trio will begin maneuvering for a delicate celestial embrace with the Soviets that would have seemed an improbable science-fiction fantasy only a decade ago.

Described rather prosaically in the press brochures as ASTP (for Apollo-Soyuz Test Project), the great U.S.-Soviet appointment in space is a considerable undertaking. If it succeeds, it will be the first international docking in space. Winle the mission involves no skills that are not already witinn the proven capability of both sides, it is no small technical and managerial feat to link up two spacecraft that are of different design and have been launched from pads 6,500 miles apart, and briefly bridge—for four days of pursuit, docking and undocking—two radically different technologies, languages and social systems. Says NASA's deputy administrator George Low: "We are opening the door for many more cooperative efforts in the future."

A good many doors have already been pried open to bring about tins week's costly, cosmic spectacular. The flight was preceded by some 2,000 hours of training by the American and Soviet crewmen and back-up teams in Houston, Cape Canaveral and Star City, the cosmonaut complex outside Moscow. There was also close cooperation by U.S. and Soviet design and engineering teams, as well as delicate diplomatic negotiations that go back five years and, ultimately, to 1961, when President John Kennedy, in a light moment at ins Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev, suggested to the Soviet Premier: "Let's go to the moon together." Khrushchev's reply: "Why not?"