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yesterday

Apollo-Soyuz Docking System Marks 50th Anniversary and Powers the ISS

The 1975 mission’s pioneering technical cooperation endures despite fresh strains in NASA-Roscosmos relations.

The culmination of years of international negotiations and training, Apollo and Soyuz linked up in space in July 1975. When the hatches opened, their respective commanders, Thomas Stafford and Aleksey Leonov, shook hands. Credit: NASA
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Overview

  • Fifty years ago today, Stafford and Leonov shook hands in orbit during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, inaugurating a bilateral crew exchange that transcended Cold War rivalry.
  • Mission engineers bridged incompatible designs by developing an androgynous peripheral attach system for docking.
  • That APAS standard evolved through Shuttle-Mir link-ups in the 1990s and continues to secure modules on the ISS.
  • During their two-day docked operations, crews carried out pioneering experiments, including extragalactic pulsar observations and spaceborne electrophoresis of biological materials.
  • Renewed geopolitical strains have cast doubt on future U.S.-Russian missions even as the ISS remains dependent on a docking mechanism born in 1975.