1. Serving as the final act in the protracted space race, in July 1975 the United States and the Soviet Union put aside their rivalries to share the honor of staging the first multinational crewed mission in space
A symbol of the ongoing détente – a relaxation of the hostilities between the competing superpowers – the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project demonstrated the potential of humanity in outer space without rivalry and marked the end of the Space Race which had begun almost twenty years prior. Involving the docking of an Apollo Command Module, surplus and repurposed from the Apollo program, and a Soviet spacecraft, the Soyuz 19, both two-man crews launched on July 15, 1975, to prepare for docking two days later. Among the Soviets, was Alexey Leonov, the first man to walk in space a decade earlier.
Spending a total of 44 hours together, during which time President Gerald Ford phoned the crew and gifts were exchanged, the American crew maneuvered their spacecraft to create an artificial solar eclipse to allow the Soviets to photograph the solar corona before returning to Earth. Sadly, despite hopes at the time of the mission that it might result in space, and even politics in general, becoming less competitive between the two nations, the legacy of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was limited. Both nations renewed national enterprises as the Cold War heated upon once more, with international cooperation not restarting until the 1990s with the International Space Station.