Alexei Leonov, left, and Thomas Stafford, right, shake hands in space somewhere over Western Germany after the Apollo-Soyuz docking maneuvers
July 17, 1975 — Not a whit of hard science, barely a scrap of substance, but what a nice couple of days in space. In the deep chill of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. decided to send joint crews aloft to meet and dock in orbit, exchange handshakes and plaques and other commemorative geegaws and, most important, beam some genial pictures back home. The two-man Soviet crew included the smilingly ursine Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalker and an overall affable presence; the three-man Apollo crew included Deke Slayton, one of the original seven astronauts, who was at last getting his first trip into space after being grounded by a heart murmur more than a decade before. Politics and astronautics can mix, never better than aboard Apollo-Soyuz.