On July 15, 1975, within a few hours of each other, manned spacecraft – the Soviet Soyuz-19 and the American Apollo – took off into the sky to conduct an experiment in docking and creating the first-ever unified international orbital complex.
Two days later, Soviet cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov met American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Slayton in the docking module. The docking took place when the ships were flying over Moscow, and the cosmonauts shook hands over the Elbe, which was very symbolic, given that it took place in the year of the 30th anniversary of the Great Victory.
But four short months before that historic event, according to a declassified Top Secret document from the Soviet Ministry of General Machine Building, a leak was detected in the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS), the docking system to be used to connect the US and Soviet spacecraft together. Because of the international visibility of the program, the General Machine Building Deputy Minister Georgiy Tyulin issued a 17 March 1975 Top Secret order demanding all hands come together to figure out the cause of the defect, whether or not the same flaw could manifest in the other models, come up with a plan of action to eliminate said flaw, and study the results of the APAS flight testing, as well as the testing of other units in the series. Other tasks included a breakdown of the current pressure-testing methodology used at NPO Energiya [NPO – scientific development and production center], the production plant responsible for the APAS components.
One final word was added to double-check the quality and sufficiency of “the “existing documentation at the production facilities” – possibly inferring that appropriate changes be made in advance to said documentation in the event of a catastrophic failure during the execution of the mission itself.
Some of the names featured in the order: Director and General Designer of NPO Energiya Glushko, Deputy General Director of NPO Energiya Trufanov, Chief Designer and Director of the Apollo-Soyuz project Bushuyev, Director of the Experimental Machine-Building Plant Klyucharev, General Director of TsNII of Material Engineering Konradi, TsNII of Machine-Building Mozzhorin and Karmishin, and NII of Machine-Building Technology Kolupayev.
The translation of this declassified order is provided below.
Translating History 