Word: launching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...went according to plan, Soyuz would spend another day and a half in space before landing July 21 under its single large parachute in the deserts of Kazakhstan, east of the Russians' Baikonur launch site. The Apollo crewmen, whose ship has far greater fuel and oxygen capacity than the smaller Soyuz, planned to stay in orbit another three days after the Russians landed, to conduct a series of experiments...
Soviet TV devoted five hours of air time to the mission on the day of the launch, carrying the Soviet space story from the late cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to live coverage of the Soyuz liftoff. Day after day, large headlines splashed across newspapers, pushing the official line that the joint flight was, as one edition of Izvestia trumpeted, an ORBIT OF COOPERATION. In Moscow, sidewalk traffic tapered off noticeably before the Soyuz launch, the first Soviet launch its citizens have ever been shown live, as shoppers gathered before TV sets or display in stores and shopwindows all over the city...
Though almost everyone was tuned in to the televised spectacular, it was difficult to ascertain how many were really turned on by the mission. One woman who had ventured into the big GUM department store near Red Square at launch time to buy a TV set grumbled that the crowds kept her from the sales counter. Asked what he thought of Soyuz's successful liftoff, a stroller along Gorky Street replied: "Oh, has it all started?" A man absorbed in a chess game in a nearby park was just as blasé. "Chess is more difficult," he shrugged...
With their usual savvy in separating reality from official propaganda, ordinary Russians seemed to recognize that the joint flight was as much a diplomatic exercise as a technological feat, and they were divided on its value. One launch watcher at the GUM store, Valery Gromov, a Moscow mathematician, suggested that the joint U.S.-Soviet mission might help "move aside the feelings of mistrust" on both sides. But another middle-aged Muscovite disagreed. "Everyone knows the political side of it," he grumped. "They have no need to talk about...
...plans and exchanging ideas in memos, telephone calls and meetings every three or four months. But the Americans kept running into a familiar obstacle: the Soviets' still compulsive secrecy. The Russians, for instance, know that U.S. spy satellites have taken minutely detailed photographs of their Baikonur cosmodrome, winch launches both military and civilian space hardware. Still, the Soviets refuse to show the center on any maps; the name Baikonur actually refers to a city some 200 miles away. When the Russians reluctantly allowed the American astronauts to see the Soyuz launch site, they took care to fly them...