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In the early 1970s, two nations with competing ideologies and distinctly different lifestyles, then in the midst of a Cold War, put aside their differences to design and plan a joint mission which resulted in the first rendezvous and docking of their separate spacecraft in earth orbit on July 17, 1975. Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev congratulated the astronauts and cosmonauts on this memorable event brought about by thawing relations between the Americans and Soviets. Later that day. President Gerald R. Ford spoke from the White House with the crews. He applauded the efforts of the American and Soviet scientists, technicians, and engineers; the mission took many years to plan, but proved that adversaries could bridge their differences and cooperate in space. Thomas P. Stafford, commander of the American expedition and an Air Force Brigadier General at the time, later noted, "We had come a long way from flights along the Iron Curtain, secret missile tests, and the moon race" (1).
This joint effort, known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), symbolized the policy of détente pursued by the Nixon administration. The strategy strove to loosen tensions between the two superpowers and to pursue shared interests in the fields of science, health, and space in the spirit of friendship and camaraderie. As the ASTP manager Glynn Lunney explained, the "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was part of that general thrust" of the foreign policy efforts of President Richard M. Nixon and his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, which "had to do with engaging the Soviet Union and trying to find areas of common ground." While the primary objective of the flight was to test the compatibility of docking hardware in space, President Nixon, who signed an agreement in support of a joint spaceflight with the Soviets in May 1972, viewed the mission as part of his foreign policy initiatives, rather than a simple engineering test flight (2). Although his administration touted the successful negotiations of the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty as the best examples of détente at work, they were less successful than American and Soviet engineers, scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts, who found common ground and achieved the goals of detente on earth and in space. Within the space community, the...