Word: spacecrafts
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With that simple exchange, the Apollo and Soyuz crewmen celebrated an impressive technological achievement: the first rendezvous and docking of spacecraft of two different nations. Next on their agenda was a round of high-altitude, high-budget diplomatic theater carefully scripted for maximum political impact. Thus three hours after the docking, the TV cameras winked on inside the surprisingly spacious Apollo...
Smiling Faces. Drifting freely inside the cylindrical-shaped docking module linking the two spacecraft, Stafford and his crewmate Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton went through an elaborate checklist as they prepared to open the safelike docking door separating them from the Soyuz crewmen. At times the mission controllers in Houston had to remind the astronauts not to obstruct the view of the cameras ("Could you move to the left or right, please...
...front of a TV camera at his desk in the Oval Office, spoke with the crewmen directly. In the nine minutes he took to applaud the flight ("a very great achievement") and interview the five men in the engaging fashion of a substitute talk-show host, the linked spacecraft, coasting at 17,500 m.p.h., traveled all the way across the Soviet Union...
...time the spacecraft parted company on Saturday, the two teams of spacemen had spent some 44 hours linked together. As Apollo pulled away, it blotted out Soyuz's view of the sun, creating an artificial solar eclipse that the cosmonauts photographed for astronomers. The ships then redocked briefly in a retest of the docking system, but this time the hatches remained closed. Before long the ships separated for the last time. As Soyuz pulled ahead under a gentle thrust from its rockets, the spacemen bade each other a final radio farewell. "Mission accomplished," said Leonov. "Good show," said Stafford...
...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...