CHAPTER ONE
Humanity’s Home in the Heavens
On July 17, 1975, at 7:19 p.m. GMT, Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov and American astronaut Tom Stafford reached across the hatches of their docked Soyuz and Apollo spacecraft and shook hands 140 miles above Earth. The event, which represented the end of a long, expensive space race and the beginning of a movement toward the peaceful exploration of space, was the end result of an agreement forged in May 1972, when President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin formalized a commitment to making a peaceful joint program of space exploration a reality. Speaking on the significance of this agreement, ...
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