EMBRACE IN SPACE

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Twenty years ago, two young cold warriors--one a U.S. Air Force fighter jockey, the other a Soviet test pilot--watched from opposite sides of the world as their countries staged a high-tech media event. The brief political thaw known as detente was in full flow, and high overhead the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft were locked in an orbital tango. Their commanders reached through the spaceships' air locks for a symbolic handshake, amid much talk that the superpowers were going to move from the space race of the 1960s to a new era of space cooperation. Despite efforts in that direction, little availed, and shortly after the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981 the joint space agreements were allowed to lapse.

It seemed inconceivable back then that those two fighter pilots would someday be on the same flight crew. Yet when the space shuttle Atlantis roared off the pad at Cape Canaveral last week in America's 100th manned launch, the two men, Robert ("Hoot") Gibson and Anatoli Solovyev, along with four other U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, were both on board. Their mission was a more ambitious reprise of the earlier Apollo-Soyuz flight: rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir, orbiting 245 miles above the earth.

Atlantis climbed quickly into a matching orbit with Mir and, over the next day or so, slowly closed a 4,000-mile gap with its target. Thursday morning, with the spacecraft 250 ft. apart and orbiting through space at 17,500 m.p.h., Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate and risky maneuvers aimed at linking the two great ships. One careless burst of a thruster jet, and Mir's feathery solar panels could be destroyed; too forceful a bump from Atlantis, and either or both craft could be severely damaged. And if Gibson and Precourt couldn't align their 100-ton spacecraft to within 3 in. and 2 [degrees] of its assigned position before the final docking, the whole mission would have to be aborted.

Sighting through a camera mounted within the shuttle's docking assembly and aiming at a target in Mir's matching equipment, Gibson gently nudged Atlantis toward the Russian station, foot by agonizing foot. At 30 ft. he stopped to make sure the alignment was perfect. It was. As millions watched on live TV and listened to the terse, four-way conversation between the two spaceships and their ground controllers at Houston and Kaliningrad, Atlantis approached to within a few feet, then inches.

And then, as six sets of hooks and latches locked into place, an American spaceship and a Russian one were soaring through space together for the first time in two decades. The astronauts and cosmonauts checked to make sure the tunnel-like air lock linking the ships had no leaks. At length, the hatches swung slowly open. Mir's commander, Vladimir Dezhurov, floated through the lock and grasped Gibson's hand in joyous greeting.

For the next few hours, there was not much to distinguish this space spectacular from the dead-end Apollo-Soyuz mission. Astronauts and cosmonauts drank toasts, exchanged symbolic gifts (flowers, candy and fruit for the crew on Mir; the traditional Russian hospitality offering of bread and salt for the Americans), toured each other's spacecraft and issued properly portentous statements about cooperation in space--as did officials on the ground, including Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin.