Handshake over the clouds

Rivalry is what drove early space exploration. After WW2, the two superpowers on opposite sides of the world set off on a race from the planet’s surface into the cosmic void. Most of the time, they would race against each other. But after the Soviets set up permanent space stations on Low Earth Orbit and the Americans put a man on the Moon, the time came to hold back the competition and cooperate.

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The first step on the road to building the International Space Station was the Apollo Soyuz Test Project. A redesigned pair of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft met in orbit and docked together in 1975. Their respective commanders, Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov, shook hands inside the airlock brought to orbit by Apollo. The spaceships remained docked for two days.

The ASTP mission was a great step forward but for a long time the only one. It also marked the end of an era, as the Apollo used for that mission was the last of its kind. Six years later the era of space shuttles began, which renewed cooperation between the once-rivals. In 1994, Russia and the USA started the Shuttle-Mir program, which saw Russians riding shuttles and Americans visiting the Mir space station, with Norman Thagard being the first US citizen to ever fly a Soyuz. This was the preliminary phase and a technology testbed before launching the first module of the International Space Station in 1998.

The next step in collaboration:
International Space Station