The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

NASA SP-4209 in the NASA History Series, Washington, D.C., 1978, by the husband-and-wife historian team of Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell — the latter also a co-author, with Jane Van Nimmen, of Volumes II and III of the NASA Historical Data Book elsewhere in this collection. Foreword by Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., Director of the Johnson Space Center, dated November 1977, who describes the nearly 20-year evolutionary process behind the joint US-Soviet flight and notes that no more than two hundred managers, engineers, and technicians from each nation ever came into direct contact. The authors’ preface describes their work as “combat history” — interviewing and observing joint working-group sessions in Houston with tape recorders in hand, and, since none of them traveled to the Soviet Union, relying on participants’ own recollections of the Moscow negotiations. The book traces the roughly two-decade path to the July 1975 docking and introduces the five participating astronauts and cosmonauts as they worked together in orbit.