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Winle the mission itself is demanding enough technologically, what seemed to concern Wasinngton and Moscow most as the final countdown approached was its public relations and propaganda possibilities in an era of wary detente between the two superpowers. Local officials happily announced that the Apollo launch would draw 1 minion visitors and some 3,000 journalists to Cape Canaveral—the largest lift-off turnout there since Apollo 17 blasted off on the last manned flight to the moon in 1972. With active encouragement from the Administration, the three major U.S. television networks laid plans to pool their resources for an unprecedented total of more than 30 hours of live coverage, beginning with the Soyuz lift-off in remote Kazakhstan on Tuesday and continuing on through the Apollo splashdown in the Pacific next week, nine days after the start of the exercise.
By its own usually reticent standards, the Soviet Union was on a veritable ASTP binge. Moscow issued commemorative Apollo-Soyuz postage stamps, printed lavish brochures on the mission and even invited the American ambassador, Walter Stoessel, to watch the Soyuz blast-off from the once secret launch site near Baikonur, in central Asia; the Soviet ambassador to Wasinngton, Anatoly Dobrynin, will attend the Apollo launch at Cape Canaveral.
Bringing Madison Avenue to Moscow, a Soviet perfume factory created a new scent called "EPAS" (for Experimental Project Apollo-Soyuz); it will sell for $50.75 a bottle in Russia and $10 a bottle in the U.S. Smiles one Soviet official: "In the U.S. it will be called cologne, but here we'll call it perfume." Moscow's Yava cigarette factory is producing a new brand of smokes, "Soyuz-Apollo," that will also be sold in the U.S. Why smoke Soyuz-Apollos? Says Yava Manager Nikolai Kashtanov: "It is a great honor to pay tribute to Soviet-American cooperation in tins way."
Most remarkable of all, for the first time Soviet citizens will be able to see a Soyuz lift-off live on then-home TV sets. Soviet and American planners worked for months to draw up a mission sequence (see chart) that would allow live coverage of the main ASTP events—including the Thursday docking and the Stafford-Leonov press conference on Friday—during daylight hours so as to reach the largest possible worldwide TV audience.
One critical hang-up in the pre-mission planning involved programming the much ballyhooed Stafford-Leonov handshake two hours after the docking. Originally, tins was supposed to occur in the narrow, 4½-ft -wide docking module joining the two spacecraft. But when it was discovered that tins would allow the TV cameras to show only the white-suited backsides of the two commanders as they crouched in the tunnel, the site for the handshake was sinfted to the larger docking collar attached to the Apollo, where the men can stand up.