HUMMMM… WHAT TO
DO?
Following Thursday’s historic docking and handshake in space I was scheduled to work a half-day on Friday. Thereafter I had a choice: I had the next two-and-one-half days off and I could either stay home in my room in the basement monitoring ASTP, or I could go up to the lake and spend time with my new girlfriend.
Hummm… what to do?
It was a choice that is rare for a space geek; either stay home and watch for spaceflight news snippets on the TV, or go up to the lake and be with a gorgeous blond babe.
What would any all-American, red-blooded 17-year-old, die-hard space-buff do?
RIGHT ! And we didn't listen to "Sweet Home Alabama" all day long... we listened to Bad Company, (sorry Kid Rock.)
When I returned
from up on the lake two-and-one-half days later, I did my best to catch up on
the latest ASTP news. I had wanted to keep my tapes complete while I was gone and
so I needed a member of the family to help. Mom was out of the question,
referencing some of my “smart assed” behavior earlier in the mission. Dad was
always working and my sister was preparing to dance on a local showboat. That
left my 12-year-old brother; the one person I knew I could depend on.
Whenever I
politely asked Craig to assist me in something like this he always did an
outstanding job. Craig, even at age 12, was more savvy and dependable than 99
percent of the adults I had met. That was, of course, if I asked politely. If I
ordered him like an older brother, the results were different. Once after a
hockey game we were sitting in the Blue Line Club with friends and I demanded
that Craig “Go get me a glass of water!” Moments later he showed up smiling
with a cool glass of crystal clear water. I took a drink and he asked me if I
liked it? I said that I did and he responded that he had gotten it out of the
toilet.
So it was that I
asked Craig, very politely, if he would help me and record the stuff from ASTP
that I may be missing while I was up at the lake. He agreed to man my recording
equipment in the basement while I was gone. The results were amazing! He
captured moments that I would have otherwise missed and
scanned all three networks for tidbits. Now there would be no gap in my ASTP
tapes. I am proud to say that my brother and I have always been the best of
friends. I just never order him to fetch me a glass of anything.
While I had been up at the lake I'd missed the real "heart" of the mission. On Apollo 8 the "heart" had been the Christmas eve broadcast live from lunar orbit. On Apollo 15 the "heart" had been watching the crew take samples at Elbow Crater with the LRV's camera broadcasting the view down Hadley Rille. Skylab's "heart" was having astronauts Conrad and Kerwin fix the jammed SAS wing during and EVA. Additionally, the "heart" was served up when the crew of SL-4 stuck it out for a world record in orbit. Now, ASTP's "heart" was a made for TV handshake followed by the exchanging of some politically approved trinkets. Up at the lake, I wasn't missing much.
Although much of the smiles and posing looked very contrived and practiced, which they actually were, Stafford and Leonov made it work.
The fact is that Stafford and Leonov, two military pilots from opposing ends of the cold war, became true life-long friends.
Leonov and Stafford messing with a docking simulator decades after ASTP.
No sooner had the first transfer of crew taken place than President Ford was on the phone to the orbiting crew. Due to a communications glitch that was haunting Soyuz, Slayton was asked by Mission Control to allow Leonov to use his Snoopy Ears headset so the the cosmonaut could hear the U.S. President.
Another aspect of the ASTP show was the fact that some of the photos were very candid.
Here we see Stafford and Slayton having some squeeze treats. Leonov, having remembered a toast he gave back in 1965 in a small gathering of three astronauts and two cosmonauts where he said that some day they should gather together in space and have a drink, in preparation for ASTP he took two tubes of soup and had them marked "Old Vodka." Early in the ASTP orbital flight he and Stafford were scheduled to have a meal together. He handed Slayton the tube and basically said "a toast!" Stafford knowing that consuming booze in flight was a huge no-no, yet not wanting to offend his Russian friend, took a careful sip... expecting Vodka, yet getting soup. Deke once described the jokester Leonov as the Soviet's version of Wally Schirra.
Stafford, Leonov and Slayton show that you can fit three into the Soyuz Orbital Module... as long as one is half way into the tunnel to the DM. So... I guess it's really two and a half.
A very accomplished artist, Leonov shows off a pencil sketch of Stafford. Note, again, that he is wearing an Apollo "Snoopy ears" headset rather than the standard Soyuz headset.
Deke Slayton had been a major player in the U.S. space program, but somehow he found a form of personal validation by flying on ASTP. In the world of flying, those moments come to us all, yet they are always kept very private, although highly satisfying.
Whoever came up with this symbolic shield-like thing was likely quite proud to see it fly. The rest of us had a sort of, "what the hell is that thing" impression.
Here we see Kubasov signing another artifact.
Mission Control as Stafford and Leonov give a news conference. Look closely and you can see just how non-intense Mission Control is at that moment.
The two days of joint operations which involved shifting and shuffling of crews, both astronauts and cosmonauts were in their respective spacecraft and the hatches were closed out by 4pm Houston time.
WATCH FOR PART 6
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