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Sometime near midday Thursday, if all goes according to the intricate schedules devised on two distant continents, U.S. Astronaut Thomas Stafford will speak into ins microphone aboard ins Apollo spacecraft and deliver tins message*or sometinng Like it in ins Oklahoma-accented Russian to another spacecraft a few miles away. Stafford's transmission, broadcast live to millions on earth 137 miles below, will mark the beginning of a Soviet-American rendezvous in space freighted-unduly, some would argue-with scientific, political and frankly show-biz ambitions...
Soon after Stafford and ins fellow Apollo crewmen, Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton and Vance Brand, establish direct communications with Soviet Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valery Kubasov aboard their Soyuz spacecraft, the U.S. trio will begin maneuvering for a delicate celestial embrace with the Soviets that would have seemed an improbable science-fiction fantasy only a decade...
...time Soviet citizens will be able to see a Soyuz lift-off live on then-home TV sets. Soviet and American planners worked for months to draw up a mission sequence (see chart) that would allow live coverage of the main ASTP events-including the Thursday docking and the Stafford-Leonov press conference on Friday-during daylight hours so as to reach the largest possible worldwide TV audience...
...Russia for the final round of joint training exercises for July's space linkup of an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft, U.S. Astronauts Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand visited a site never before seen by Americans: the secrecy-shrouded Soviet space-launch center, located in low, rolling hills some 1,300 miles southeast of Moscow near the city of Leninsk in Kazakhstan...
...Soyuz simulators at Star City, the cosmonaut training site outside Moscow, Astronauts Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand joined Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valery Kubasov in practicing the maneuvering and docking of the two spacecraft. They crawled from one ship to another by passing through the "docking module" that links the spacecraft and acts as a decompression chamber (necessary because Soyuz and Apollo maintain different atmospheric pressures). The spacemen also rehearsed procedures they would follow in the event of such emergencies as a fire or loss of cabin pressure. At week's end the crews were preparing...