Training for Togetherness

Welcomed by vodka toasts to U.S.Soviet friendship, American astronauts arrived in Russia last week to begin the final round of joint training exercises for next July's historic linkup of a U.S. Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. Both the American and Russian crews were confident that the flight would be successful; they all signed the jug of vodka, recorked it and promised to polish it off when they got back from orbit.

In the Soyuz simulators at Star City, the cosmonaut training site outside Moscow, Astronauts Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand joined Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valery Kubasov in practicing the maneuvering and docking of the two spacecraft. They crawled from one ship to another by passing through the "docking module" that links the spacecraft and acts as a decompression chamber (necessary because Soyuz and Apollo maintain different atmospheric pressures). The spacemen also rehearsed procedures they would follow in the event of such emergencies as a fire or loss of cabin pressure. At week's end the crews were preparing to leave for the Soviet launch center in Kazakhstan, which has never before been visited by U.S. astronauts.

To a large extent, the activities were a rerun of similar exercises last February at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where NASA has set up comparable simulators. Last week NASA released the first photographs of these sessions, showing scenes that would have been unthinkable at the height of the space race: Russian and American spacemen sharing their rations, lying side by side on their couches and operating the controls of each other's craft.

Russian Reassurances. As preparations for the mission continued, some American officials were still worried over the failure of the latest Soyuz flight (TIME, April 21). The Russians sought to reassure them. Referring to the Soyuz's emergency landing near the Chinese border, Major General Vladimir Shatalov, chief of cosmonaut training, said: "Of course, no one would have conducted such a test on purpose. But the flight did help confirm the Soyuz spaceship's full potentialities--in particular, the ability to save crewmen's lives in an extraordinary situation." That may indeed be true. But if for any reason Soyuz does not make it into orbit, NASA will not be entirely unprepared. The space agency has quietly planned an alternative flight in which the U.S. team would try to rendezvous and dock with the abandoned Skylab space station, which is still circling the earth.

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