I'm John Bachelor with my colleagues David Livingston, my co-pilot for Hotel Mars,

and Anatole Zach are historian, especially of Roscoezmos, but this is Roscosmos,

NASA.

It's the building of Rapprochema, fancy French word for work together.

We were states at odds, nuclear-powered states and nuclear damage states. We always

thought about the nuclear weapons, but there was a Russ Cosmos program that was leading.

There was a NASA program that caught up with the moon landing.

And then, Anatolia, this is wonderful.

What was

a policy use, I use, a policy use test flight project.

And it was, I think, agreed upon in the early 70s and was

implemented in 1975 but again many many decades later we still kind of

learning new details about this project which surprisingly we either didn't

know very well or they were not really they were kind of in a shadow of history and one of them

is the fact that Soviet Union actually flew several missions before the Soyuz Apollo in preparation.

It's essentially like a dress rehearsal for Apollo Soyuz.

And what's interesting,

they didn't advertise this at all.

In fact, they didn't tell NASA that they were doing this.

So this secret code Soyuz K-T-M

was essentially the version of the Soyuz K-T-M was essentially the version of the Soyuz spacecraft, which they were

developed specifically for joint flight with the Apollo. However, because it was multi-purpose vehicle and they hope to use it in the future for their own purposes, they never informed really NASA that they were doing this.

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