Apollo launched from Kennedy Space Center hours after Soyuz 19 lifted off from Baikonur, and two days later the crews docked in orbit and shook hands through a connecting hatch. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project signaled détente in orbit, ending the fierce space race rivalry that had defined the 1960s.
At 3:20 PM Moscow time, cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov launched aboard Soyuz 19, and just over seven hours later American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Deke Slayton lifted off from Florida aboard the last Apollo spacecraft ever flown. The mission had been negotiated over years of diplomacy, requiring engineers on both sides to design a common docking mechanism, since Soviet and American spacecraft used completely incompatible systems.
Two days later, on July 17, the spacecraft docked in orbit, and Stafford and Leonov clasped hands through the open hatch in a moment broadcast to millions worldwide. Leonov, who had performed the world's first spacewalk in 1965, had spent months learning English, while Stafford's Oklahoma drawl butchering Russian became a running joke between the crews.
The mission carried genuine risk: Apollo used pure oxygen while Soyuz used a nitrogen-oxygen mix, and returning astronauts were later hospitalized after a toxic gas leak during reentry. Still, the flight's political symbolism outweighed its scientific yield, offering a rare image of cooperation between superpowers who had spent a decade racing each other to the Moon with barely concealed hostility.