50th Anniversary of Apollo-Soyuz Mission: The Road to the Orbital Handshake

The docking of the Soviet and American space crafts as part of the ASTP program on July 17, 1975, at the height of the Cold War, became a landmark event in world manned space exploration. The so-called "handshake in space" became a symbol of the détente policy, having demonstrated not only the significance of peaceful space exploration and international cooperation but also the high level of scientific diplomacy and technical solutions that made the US-Soviet space flight possible. The article describes the process of preparation for the space flight, beginning with the establishment of ties in the field of peaceful space exploration, and is illustrated with documents from the collections of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.