The Flight of Apollo-Soyuz

The final flight of the Apollo spacecraft in 1975, was the first docking of spacecraft built by different nations and presaged the era of cooperation between the Russians and the Americans.

The two spacecraft were launched within seven and a half hours of one another, and, three hours after they docked two days later, the Astronauts and Cosmonauts met in the middle and shook hands in orbit, exchanged flags and gifts and conversed haltingly with one another in each other's native tongues.

It would be six long years before another American astronaut would fly in space, this time aboard the reusable Space Shuttle. The Apollo era, an era of the greatest achievements in mankind's history, had ended.