Seen by millions of earth-bound television viewers against the dark background of space, the deliberate, exquisitely choreographed ballet of the two spacecraft looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001. Gliding silently 140 miles high over the Atlantic, the U.S. Apollo made its slow, gingerly approach to the beetle-shaped Soviet Soyuz, whose features appeared so clearly on TV screens that sunlight could be seen glinting off its winglike solar panels. Then came the slight bump as the two ships, now somewhere over the North Atlantic, made contact. "We have succeeded!" Apollo...
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