The Partnership: A NASA History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

Copyright

Copyright © 2010 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2010, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in the NASA History Series as NASA SP-4209, Washington, D.C., in 1978. The frontispiece from the original edition has been moved to the inside front cover. A new Introduction by Paul Dickson has been added to this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ezell, Edward Clinton.

The partnership: a history of the Apollo-Soyuz test project / Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell ; introduction to the Dover edition by Paul Dickson.—Dover ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Washington : National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1978, inseries: NASA SP ; 4209.

Includes index.

9780486135915

1. Apollo Soyuz Test Project. 2. Astronautics—International cooperation. I. Ezell, Linda Neuman. II. Title.

TL788.4.E95 2010

629.45’4—dc22

2010021689

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

47889001

www.doverpublications.com

To

Hugh Latimer Dryden

1898-1965

and

Anatoliy Arkadyevich Blagonravov

1894-1975

Introduction to the Dover Edition

In July 2010, surviving members of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission met in New York City to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft: the American Apollo (often referred to as Apollo 18, although there was a previously scheduled moon landing mission numbered Apollo 18 which was cancelled for budgetary reasons) and the Soviet Soyuz 19. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) was the first human spaceflight joint venture between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union.

Astronaut Vance Brand, who served as the Apollo command module pilot, was at the reunion and said Apollo-Soyuz started a big thing. It has evolved into other cooperative programs—Mir and the International Space Station (ISS). The International Space Station has something like fifteen countries involved. There is a lot of cooperation that I think was never expected back in the 1970s and it has been a very good thing. By the time of the ASTP reunion the United States had become somewhat dependent of the Russian space program. NASA was by then under contract with Russia to carry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) until the U.S. was again ready to deploy a commercial spacecraft or a U.S. successor to the Space Shuttle, probably around 2015.

A third of a century earlier, on July 17, 1975, the two Cold War rivals linked spacecraft that were built halfway around the world from one another. The mission of the Apollo-Soyuz was conceived as a symbolic gesture to end the Space Race between the two countries, a competition that began when the Soviets were the first to launch an earth-orbiting satellite—Sputnik 1—into orbit on October 4, 1957. The Apollo-Soyuz project was symbolic of the increasing political detente between the two countries. At that moment the older Cold War competition yielded to increasing cooperation in the realm of space.

Symbolism aside, the architects of the plan realized there was a practical reason for cooperating—the safety of astronauts and cosmonauts. They wanted compatible docking equipment on space stations to permit rescue operations in space emergencies. This was an issue which had been raised in the public mind as a result of the 1969 space disaster movie Marooned and subsequently rendered real during the voyage of Apollo 13 in 1970. The spaceship experienced a major failure but the crew was saved by their use of the onboard Lunar Module as a lifeboat during the return trip to earth.

After rendezvous and docking, the Apollo and the Soyuz spacecraft remained docked together for forty-four hours. During that time, they conducted experiments, exchanged flags and signatures, ate together and proposed nonalcoholic toasts—actually borscht in a tube labeled as vodka—to their two nations and the future of space exploration.

The Partnership was originally published in 1978 when the value of the mission was still very much a matter of controversy. There were vociferous critics in congress in the years leading up to the project who objected to it on several levels, beginning with its cost (a costly space circus said one editorial) and ending with a strong distrust of the Soviet’s ability to make it work. Others saw it as a giveaway of American technology. Robert B. Hotz, editor-in-chief of Aviation Week and Space Technology, saw it as pure propaganda and editorialized: the real tragedy for this country was the decision to put its scarce space dollars into the political fanfare of Apollo-Soyuz.

The book is a fascinating and deftly written narrative. It underscores the conditions under which this complex mission was accomplished. The challenges were not only technical but cultural, ideological, and political. Some challenges were especially fascinating in light of the progress of the intervening years. Consider the matter of communications between the two countries. This is how the Ezells describe an early attempt to iron out some preliminary questions about the docking mechanism: Because the overseas circuits were busy, nearly forty minutes passed before the NASA party reached the [Soviet] Academy of Sciences. For seventy-five minutes, the two sides struggled with the initially awkward process of talking through an interpreter over a not-too-perfect overseas telephone connection. On the Soviet side, the process was complicated by the fact that they were using two telephone handsets, but in Houston a conference arrangement circumvented the necessity of passing the phone from one person to the other. Communication was made even more cumbersome because each side had to transcribe the conversation, type it up and mail it half way around the world.

The authors not only show us how it was all put together but bring out the human side of the story, which includes the distinct personalities of the five spacefarers—three Americans and two Soviets.

Despite fears that Soviet engineering and science might not be up to the project, and that the Soviet spacecraft might not be safe, eventually the project was regarded by both nations as an exercise in perfection in which differences in everything from hardware to language to units of measurement were overcome. The voices of the critics who saw the mission as a boondoggle or a technological giveaway faded as cooperation between the two countries became the norm.

The 2010 ASTP reunion was notable in the sense that the participants got to relive the historic rendezvous and docking for perhaps the last time. They also got to honor their fallen comrade Donald Kent Deke Slayton, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, whose first and last mission was ASTP.

I opened the hatch and I saw the face of Tom Stafford, said Alexei Leonov at the reunion press conference. In addition to serving as the Soviet commander for the ASTP mission, Leonov was, ten years before ASTP, the first to conduct a spacewalk. I said, ‘Hello Tom! Hello Deke!’ and at this moment we shook hands.

PAUL DICKSON

September 2010

Foreword

In the early days of the space age, when costs for exploration were projected, members of government and the scientific community often suggested that those nations with the greatest experience in space flight band together in joint programs. The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both heavily committed to space travel, were usually identified as the countries that should cooperate rather than compete. But, as long as the machines to accomplish such feats were little past the concept and drawing board stages, cooperative efforts would have been possible only with great difficulty, if at all.

By the end of the 1960s, some form of cooperation in manned space flight made more sense from a technical standpoint. Both nations had achieved some space goals and both had mission-proven spacecraft. Joint development of a new spacecraft would have been no easier at this stage than in the early years. But if each nation furnished a craft and together the nations figured out how to use them in a cooperative orbital flight, a useful step toward learning to work together in other fields would be taken. Even this, however, was a monumental task.

Communication was a bigger problem than technology in developing the joint program—and it was not necessarily a language problem. The philosophies of spacecraft design, development, and operations were so widely separated that a great chasm of differences had to be bridged before the technical work could begin. Several Soviet and American Working Groups, as this book relates, spent long hours, over many months, negotiating and reconciling the differences to produce a successful Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission.

I had some concerns at the beginning of the cooperative program. We in NASA rely on redundant components–if an instrument fails during flight, our crews switch to another in an attempt to continue the mission. Each Soyuz component, however, is designed for a specific function; if one fails, the cosmonauts land as soon as possible. The Apollo vehicle also relied on astronaut piloting to a much greater extent than did the Soyuz machine. Moreover, both of these spacecraft, in their earlier histories, suffered tragic failures. By the time of the mission, all aspects of the two programs (hardware as well as procedures) that would be needed in the joint venture had been discussed frankly.

The exchange of people was perhaps a more significant gain than coming to some mutual understanding on how programs are conducted in the two countries and working out a joint flight project. Only about a hundred American and no more than two hundred Soviet managers, engineers, pilots, and technicians ever came into direct contact with each other, but millions of their countrymen watched with interest and discussed the activities, the families, and the ways of life (their similarities as well as their differences).

During the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and even afterwards, there were charges that the program was an American technological giveaway. These charges were unfounded. NASA’s conduct of its space programs has been covered by the media in great detail and descriptions of its systems can be found in many technical journals in libraries and bookstores. However, no one can build an Apollo or a Soyuz merely by reading a book or visiting a factory. These craft are the products of many, many incremental steps, lasting for years, and of the development of a personnel reservoir capable of managing a space program from concept through operations. Both sides did gain some new knowledge, but the benefits accrued by working together probably outweigh any potential threat. Apollo-Soyuz was the product of an evolutionary process of nearly 20 years. This book traces the events that led to this cooperative flight and then introduces the reader to five men, from two nations, as they worked together in the vastness of space.

Christopher C. Kraft, Jr.

Director, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center

November 1977

Preface

Apollo and Soyuz docked in space on 17 July 1975. The American and Soviet space teams met in orbit to test an international docking system and joint flight procedures. Sometimes lost in the extensive coverage given the event by the media was the fact that the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) was only a first step–an experiment. Implicit in the preparations for the first international rendezvous and docking was the idea that in the future manned space flight—both routine flights and rescue missions—could use the hardware concepts and mission procedures developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. As a first step, ASTP was a success. The hardware was sound, and specialists from the two nations worked truly as a team. This history of ASTP is also a first step.

Apollo and Soyuz were still 16 months away from their rendezvous when we began this history in April 1974. But interest in an official record of the joint effort goes back to at least the summer of 1972, when ASTP emerged as a full-scale project after the Nixon-Kosygin summit agreement on cooperation in space. Throughout NASA, individuals who were preparing for the mission were aware that they were involved in a unique experience. Nearly all these people had originally come to the space agency during the Cold War to help ensure American preeminence in space. But with ASTP, they were asked to cooperate with their rival. Indeed, they were expected to build and test hardware that would permit a joint flight by mid-1975. Not everyone in NASA was sympathetic with this goal, but nearly all were intrigued by the challenge.

NASA employees have thrived on challenges. As members of a brand new agency, they had dared to overcome the risks involved in putting a man into orbit. Project Mercury had been the answer to that first bold challenge. They mastered the difficulties of space rendezvous in the second manned program, Gemini. And in the boldest of all challenges in the span of a single decade, they worked together to send men to the moon and return them safely. During the Skylab missions, they broke new barriers as man learned to live for extended periods of time in the zero-gravity environment of space. But flying a joint mission with the Soviet Union would be more than just a technological feat; it would require diplomacy, hardheaded perseverance, and good humor. NASA accepted the new challenge, despite pessimistic voices inside and outside the agency.

There is an infectious spirit of optimism at NASA. Individuals do not go about saying they are optimists; they just act in ways that indicate they are. Contracting for a history of ASTP before the hardware was finished and before the mission was flown was one example of this positive frame of mind. The ASTP team at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston knew that Apollo and Soyuz would rendezvous and dock in space.

This history is an official history only because it was sponsored by NASA. The authors were invited through a contract to record their version of the events that led to, shaped, and emerged from the joint flight. When we first met with Glynn S. Lunney, the American Technical Director for ASTP, we asked, Why do you want to have a history written? Lunney responded that he had never asked himself precisely that question but that he did desire to see preserved the subtlety of human interaction that he had observed during the first four years of the project. Lunney went on to suggest that the technical aspects of ASTP were not nearly as interesting, or perhaps as significant, as the working relationships that had emerged among the technical specialists of the two nations. Written documents tend often to be dry and distilled, he thought. Lunney wanted a historian to see firsthand some of the personal interplay so that the flavor of the working sessions could be preserved along with the story that could be found in more conventional documents.

Our history is to a large extent based upon oral records. Sometimes dubbed combat historians, or less favorably, instant historians, we stalked the halls of the joint meetings in Houston with tape recorders in hand. Although never quite a part of the furniture, we were not an apparent disturbance to any of the negotiations we witnessed. And although we never traveled to the Soviet Union, those who did gave freely of their time, recollecting their experiences or answering our questions. Sometimes we cornered them in the halls between negotiating sessions, at other times by telephone. But whether it was over a quick cup of coffee while they waited for Xerox copies of a document or during a hamburger break, these men and women went out of their way to help, to explain, and to re-explain.

In addition to this firsthand observation of ASTP activities and interviews with participants, we had the typical embarrassment of riches that has faced all those who have written history for NASA.a Several early participants had already retired their desk archives to the JSC history office by the spring of 1974, when the authors began receiving all correspondence originating from the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office relating to ASTP as part of the daily distribution of such materials. In the future, when researchers look at the correspondence files that we have left behind at the Johnson Space Center and see BE4/EZELL, they will know that the historians were reading everyone’s mail. Much of the material we sifted through was extremely detailed. We could learn how many electrical connectors for the VHF/AM transceiver were being shipped to Moscow or what the latest revisions were to the Joint Crew Activities Plan; so we spent many days separating the nitty-gritty telexes and test data from the material that would permit us to tell the larger story.

The book that emerged from these efforts has both strengths and weaknesses. First, we have told essentially the NASA side of the story. We had free access to American materials and members of the NASA team. In addition, NASA has an ongoing history program, which makes the historian’s task an easier one. Most of the information on earlier programs is readily at hand in published histories or works in progress. The Soviet space program by contrast is shrouded in mystery. The Soviets have not produced any comparable historical studies of their programs, and when we requested Soviet assistance with this history we were informed politely, but firmly, that they did not wish to discuss history. As a consequence, we had only limited opportunities to speak with members of the Soviet ASTP team. Where possible, to balance our presentation, we have cited Russian language sources, but our story remains one told from the American perspective.

Second, history written as events are unfolding can be neither entirely objective nor complete. But we have attempted to be fair in our judgments as we explained what the project meant to the participants through their personal recollections–recollections that otherwise might not have been preserved. We have tried to write an interesting narrative, sufficient in technical detail for the intelligent reader to grasp the mechanical elements of ASTP, but simple enough so that pages do not become bogged down by complex description. Those who worked on ASTP know that for every page of description in this history there are often hundreds of pages of technical documents, thousands of feet of computer tape, and seemingly endless hours of work. Some will be dismayed that their efforts were passed over or given only a line or two, but our goal has been to preserve some of the spirit of ASTP with the hope that some historians in the future will evaluate the project’s significance more fully. Years will pass before we know if the partnership of so many engineers, spacemen, negotiators, and diplomats represents a stepping stone, plateau, or pinnacle in the history of international cooperation. Only time will determine the true perspective of their performance.

Third, there are topics that we chose not to discuss in detail because they will be recorded in other NASA publications. For example, we did not describe in depth the manufacturing history of the Apollo spacecraft, since that is covered in the fourth volume of The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology (NASA SP-4009) and is the subject of the forthcoming history Chariots for Apollo. We may be accused of slighting certain groups—the State Department, the Department of Defense, or Rockwell International, the spacecraft contractor. But we think that our treatment of these organizations in this history reflects adequately their participation in ASTP. More than any single manned space flight before, ASTP was a Johnson Space Center enterprise. Technical negotiations were conducted almost exclusively by personnel from Houston. Even NASA Headquarters typically assumed an advisory and supportive role, with the notable exception of Deputy Administrator George M. Low, who played a central part in planning and directing the program. When it came to the design of the docking system and the docking module, the JSC engineers took the lead and basically told the contractor in detail what they wanted. Again, this was a departure from earlier programs and does not reflect the manner in which the Space Shuttle was to be developed. We hope our book adequately reflects the unique nature of Apollo-Soyuz.

Because the flight of Apollo and Soyuz can be understood only in the international context from which it emerged, we have presented two introductory chapters that describe the early years of Cold War competition (chap. I) and the first efforts at cooperation (chap. II). The next chapter describes the evolution of manned spacecraft in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. (chap. III), while Mission to Moscow (chap. IV) outlines the experiences of the American technical specialists during their first visit to the U.S.S.R. in October 1970. In January 1971, discussion about cooperation in space flight turned from general talk of the future to specific proposals for a test mission using existing hardware (chap. V). During the ensuing 16 months, NASA and Soviet Academy engineers began to learn to work with one another, and by May 1972 the two sides were confident that they could design and build the necessary hardware by mid-1975 (chap. VI). Once given the official seal of approval at the Nixon-Kosygin summit in May 1972, work began in earnest toward the creation of a test project (chap. VII). As the hardware evolved, the United States and the Soviet Union monitored progress with reviews, planned public release of ASTP information (chap. VIII), and selected their crews, who began their technical and linguistic training for the flight (chap. IX). Final reviews of the project were held in the spring of 1975, while critics questioned the wisdom and safety of the joint mission (chap. X). All the efforts culminated in a nearly flawless flight in July 1975 (chap. XI), and the only unanswered question concerned what the future would hold for cooperation in space between two nations that had dared to break down old rivalries.

As for accolades to those who helped us with this history, their names are best preserved in our essay on sources, which describes the materials we used, where they came from, and how they are arranged for future use.

On 24 July 1975 after Apollo had splashed down and the crew was aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans, we chanced to encounter Glynn Lunney as he left the Mission Operations Control Room. Suit coat over his shoulder, he smiled and said, Now you have a story to tell. He was right.

Edward Clinton Ezell

Linda Neuman Ezell

Houston

July 1976

Notes

Controversy often surrounds the conversion of the Cyrillic characters used in the Russian language into the Roman letters used in English. In the absence of a universally accepted standard, we have transliterated Russian personal and place names after the pattern established by the Soviets themselves and as recorded in the English language version of the ASTP documents.

The metric system poses an equally thorny problem. NASA is committed to the national goal of metrication, and in 1973 the space agency prohibited the use of English weights and measures in all publications, including its historical series. But NASA engineers were not thinking metric all the time. ASTP documents often recorded specifications in metric form, but they almost always added the English equivalent. Furthermore, the actual production of the American components for the joint mission was done on manufacturing tooling calibrated in standard American engineering units. As some passages in the text indicate, this English/metric schizophrenia caused occasional troublesome moments when the switch from metric drawings to English tooling required extra care to determine that all the critical dimensions were correct. In this history we have followed the trend to metrication, and we have used the systeme internationale d’unites (SI) with one major exception. We have chosen millimeters of mercury to designate cabin pressures. The Soviet space community has commonly used this measurement, while their American counterparts have used pounds per square inch (psi). Neither side talked in pascals (newtons per square meter), the approved SI measurement, which would have puzzled nearly everyone who worked on ASTP.

Another metric unit requires explanation. In the English system, pound is used to describe both mass and force. The creators of the metric system devised two distinct units, the familiar gram for mass and the less familiar newton for force—thus pounds of weight become grams, but pounds of thrust become newtons. Where we wrote about thrust, we used both newtons and the equivalent in pounds. Elsewhere, we have given only the metric units to keep from cluttering the pages with endless conversions in parentheses.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction to the Dover Edition

Foreword

Preface

Notes

Prologue - The Paine-Keldysh File

I - The Years Before

II - Dryden and Blagonravov

III - Routes to Space Flight

IV - Mission to Moscow

V - Proposal for a Test Flight

VI - Forging a Partnership

VII - Creating a Test Project

VIII - Apollo and Soyuz at Mid-Term

IX - Preparing for the Mission

X - Final Examinations

XI - Come Fly with Us

Epilogue

Source Notes

Sources and Research Materials

Note on Photography

Appendix A - NASA Organization Charts