Soyuz - Apollo. The "Icebreaker" of the Cold War (2020)

The idea of a joint space flight was first expressed at NASA.

In 1970, the director of the agency Thomas Payne wrote to the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Mstislav Keldysh.

The main idea is to work out the process of mutual rescue of crews in orbit, learn how to work together and create means capable of interacting with each other.

Working groups were immediately created, which included the best scientists of the two countries, even though space technologies were always accompanied by the "Top Secret" label.

Brezhnev stressed that the USSR stands for peaceful space exploration and for the joint work of crews.

The project had enormous political significance, since no branch of science or industry cooperated with each other, and only the space program was able to overcome this obstacle.

The famous "handshake in space" not only glorified the participants of the flight to the whole world, but also went down in history as the unofficial name of the program, and cosmonauts Alexey Leonov and Thomas Stafford became friends for the rest of their lives.

The film stars cosmonauts Alexey Leonov, Alexey Eliseev, Alexander Ivanchenkov, Vladimir Shatalov, Vladimir Dzhanibekov, instructor for the Soyuz-Apollo first crew program Vladimir Baranov, replacement flight director for the Soyuz-Apollo program Viktor Blagov, writer Vladimir Gubarev, head of equipment testing for the Soyuz-Apollo program Viktor Pavlov.