Word: soyuz
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...Santiago, Chile, one of Apollo's four television cameras began sending pictures of the history-making rendezvous. Plainly visible outside Apollo's left window were the curved earth, one of the large finger-like petals of the docking module and, off in the distance, the winged Soyuz. After a few moments of maneuvering, Stafford nudged Apollo up against Soyuz so gently that there was barely a jolt as the three interlacing fingers on each ship locked together. Later at a briefing in Moscow, one of the Soviet controllers remarked that the Russians had been especially anxious during...
...Russians, rather than vice versa. How? Low says the joint mission exposed designers of the sophisticated Apollo system to the functional simplicity of less costly Soviet space hardware. On his visit to the Baikonur cosmodrome, Low was astonished to find out that the pad used to send off Soyuz had launched some 300 rockets, including the first Sputnik and the spacecraft that carried Yuri Gagarin on the first manned voyage into space. Said Low: "We have to learn not to overdo things when they don't have to be overdone...
...Here they are, the first pictures of our cosmonauts!" With that exuberant introduction, Veteran Soviet Anchor Man Yuri Fokin, 50, Moscow's properly graying, avuncular counterpart of U.S. television's Walter Cronkite, began his commentary on the first live broadcast from the orbiting Soyuz. Fokin's enthusiasm was typical: no event in recent years had been so ballyhooed by the Kremlin as the Apollo-Soyuz linkup...
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...
...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 and turned back to his board...