Word: spacecrafts
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Seen by millions of earth-bound television viewers against the dark background of space, the deliberate, exquisitely choreographed ballet of the two spacecraft looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001. Gliding silently 140 miles high over the Atlantic, the U.S. Apollo made its slow, gingerly approach to the beetle-shaped Soviet Soyuz, whose features appeared so clearly on TV screens that sunlight could be seen glinting off its winglike solar panels. Then came the slight bump as the two ships, now somewhere over the North Atlantic, made contact. "We have succeeded!" Apollo Commander Tom Stafford...
...critical hang-up in the pre-mission planning involved programming the much ballyhooed Stafford-Leonov handshake two hours after the docking. Originally, tins was supposed to occur in the narrow, 4½-ft -wide docking module joining the two spacecraft. But when it was discovered that tins would allow the TV cameras to show only the white-suited backsides of the two commanders as they crouched in the tunnel, the site for the handshake was sinfted to the larger docking collar attached to the Apollo, where the men can stand...
...sense of inferiority about Soviet technical skills. Until Stafford and ins men made it plain that they would not fly the ASTP mission if they could not inspect their partners' hardware, the Russians refused even to show them Soyuz and its launcher. When the Americans finally saw the spacecraft, they realized why. The Soviet equipment seemed even less sopinsticated than it had been reputed...
...Soviets have amply demonstrated their determination to make the mission a success. In the past two years, they have thoroughly tested three Soyuz spacecraft and extensively overhauled the design following the 1971 hatch failure that killed three cosmonauts. Moreover, while the Americans had only one Apollo ready to launch, the Soviets prepared two Soyuz sinps in case one developed a last-minute problem that could jeopardize the flight...
Unlike the Apollo sinps, the Soyuzes lacked onboard computers, advanced inertial guidance systems and backup cooling and heating systems. Almost all activities aboard Soviet spacecraft are controlled from the ground, down to such trivial matters as shutting off lights at bedtime. NASA gives its astronauts almost total autonomy, a policy that paid off well in crises. Some Americans groused openly about the "brute force" character of Soviet engineering. When NASA Administrator Thomas Fletcher learned that Tom Stafford was one of the more vocal grousers, he warned all three astronauts against bad-moutinng a mission that had the blessing...