The welcome was so warm that about the only thing missing was balalaika music. Astronaut Tom Stafford greeted the Soviet visitors to the Johnson Space Center in his newly acquired (albeit broken) Russian. Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov—who in 1965 became the first man to walk in space—promptly returned the linguistic compliment. Asked whether he anticipated any language difficulties when Stafford's Apollo spacecraft and his Soyuz rendezvous and dock in earth orbit in 1975, Leonov broke into a broad grin and said: "No problem English."
The camaraderie in Houston last week was more than simple friendliness between rival spacemen. The Soviet cosmonauts, marking...
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