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| The National Air and Space Museum display of Apollo–Soyuz |
The final Apollo flight would be in July of 1975. We were on speaking terms with the Soviets. A political era of "detente' was underway where the US and the USSR were trying to learn how to cooperate. It was a huge step forward from the fear during the moon race. These talks resulted in the first weapons treaties between us to limit the number of nuclear missiles, biological weapons and other weapons both sides were developing that had the capability to annihilate all life on the planet.
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| Soyuz spacecraft as seen from Apollo CM |
In this project we developed a docking module that could adapt the incompatible docks for each spacecraft as well as to interface between the incompatible atmospheres in each spacecraft. Working together to do this was unheard of. It required trust that the two countries were struggling to comprehend.
It was several more decades before the cold war would be over, but these steps started to pave the way. It would have been an unbelievable dream at the time to think that someday we would work in cooperation with the Soviets to build a space station or that we would be sending our astronauts to the space station on Soviet spacecraft.
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| Betamax tape |
Also in 1975, the very first home video product came to market. Sony's Betamax began a revolution. For about $1000 in 1975 dollars, you could buy a device that could record a TV show and play it back. This was a capability that had only been available in TV studios. Although this was so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford it, the home video revolution was launched. It would not be very many years before this was affordable.
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