Apollo- Soyuz, as I lived it a half century ago Pt7

 

  SOYUZ RETURNS

After departing the company of Apollo, the Soyuz crew had a full day remaining in space. They were assigned some minor scientific tasks, but Leonov had an experiment of his own to conduct. Being a very accomplished artist he found that photos simply did not capture the stunning colors and beauty of the Earth below that his eyes had witnessed.

He had been allowed to bring, aboard Soyuz, what he described as "my crayons" some drawing paper and "a special device which allowed me to measure and record, very precisely, the colors of different parts of the surface of the Earth."

Leonov recalled in the book "Two Sides of the Moon" that he was able to capture the true deep blue color of the Black Sea. He wanted to do the same with the Earth's mountain ranges, but ran out of time. He had stated to Soviet space officials that his reason for taking the art supplies aboard the spacecraft was to enable Soviet cartographers to depict maps more accurately. In my opinion it was a great excuse for the artist cosmonaut to get his tools aboard the spacecraft and the stuffed shirts in the Soviet space bureaucracy bought it completely.

July 21 was reentry day for the Soyuz. In yet another of the mission’s over hyperbolized “firsts,” the public around the world, including the Soviets, got their first chance to see a Soviet spacecraft landing and recovery. Where I had spent the last seven years seeing Apollo’s descend on three parachutes (with the exception of Apollo 15 of course), the Soyuz was suspended beneath a single chute. I was getting ready for another historic day on the Civic Center’s labor crew and got to watch the landing before I left for work as retro rockets gave a brief burst to cushion the spacecraft’s contact with the ground. Frankly I was not really impressed by it as it seemed like an odd way to return from space. 

Of course to the Soviet people Apollos splashdown probably seemed overly complicated and odd too. Like everyone else who followed the American space program, I had no idea that one day our own NASA astronauts would be landing aboard Soyuz in the exact same manner. In fact such a thing was beyond anyone’s imagination. Frankly, we were sure that the only way that the Soviet Union would dissolve would be in the mutually assured destruction of an atomic war and as long as their closed society existed, there would never be a time when Americans would fly aboard a Soyuz. We could never have guessed that just 14 years later, the Soviet empire would simply crumble, the iron curtain would lift and open the way for our two peoples to live together aboard the same space station. Such was the stuff of Star Trek and science fiction- or so we thought in 1975.