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Sunday Morning News

NASA Official Talks About U.S.-Russian Cooperation in Space

Aired July 16, 2000 - 8:35 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, the world witnessed a milestone in the history of human space flight. During a brief thaw in the Cold War, three U.S. astronauts and two Soviet cosmonauts shook hands in low earth orbit. The Apollo Soyuz test project marked the first time citizens of two countries met in space. It seems kind of quaint in retrospect, given the massive multinational space station project that is currently underway joining the U.S., Russia and 14 other nations on the high frontier.

For a look back and some thoughts on what may lie ahead, we turn to the U.S. manager for the Apollo Soyuz mission, Glynn Lunney, a man who was with NASA from the beginning. Glynn, good to see you, sir.

GLYNN LUNNEY, FMR. MANAGER, APOLLO-SOYUZ MISSION: Good morning, Miles. Nice to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right, take us back to those days when the powers that be came to you and said, you know, Dr. Lunney, we want you to head up a mission with the Soviets. In the context of the times you must have thought they might have been on some sort of substance.

LUNNEY: It was quite a different time and people forget today what the environment that existed at that time. You know, it was very much of a heated competition between the two countries. I mean the world was almost polarized between the two camps. The threat of nuclear weapons, we were still in Vietnam, which the Russians objected to. And we had had a long history of threats of various kind from the Soviet Union over the years and I grew up with it and felt very intimidated by the presence of the Soviet Union and what that might portend for our country.

O'BRIEN: Well, I guess in your own way, I mean people who were involved in NASA at that time, involved in the space race, involved in getting men to the moon were cold warriors in their own way. How hard was it to put all that aside and actually come up with a safe, workable plan working with the Russians?

LUNNEY: That was quite a challenge for us. I mean, as a matter of fact, my, on my first visit there, it was in an October, it was cold, it was snowy. It was getting dark. It was late in the afternoon and I have to tell you that our first visit I just had the sense of it being a kind of a forbidding, intimidating kind of a place. Once we got into meetings with our counterparts, though, that eased up considerably because they were grappling with many of the same problems that we had and still grapple with in space flight and in that sense we had common experience and eventually a common purpose in making this mission successful.

O'BRIEN: Well, I guess that, you know, the technology and among the engineers there is somewhat of a universal language, but through all of that, were there enduring relationships that were forged?

LUNNEY: Yes. And I think that was one of the heartwarming things about Apollo Soyuz. I think at all levels all of us had counterparts on the Soviet side and we gradually, after a period of time, began to see through the formal face that people would put on for meetings and so on and see the human beings behind those faces. And in many cases, they're very honorable and reasonable people who were occupied with either raising their children or seeing to their grandchildren.

O'BRIEN: You know, well, I don't know if you can see our air right now, but as you've been talking, we've been looking at some of the old film shot on board that mission and the pictures of the flags and the handshakes and so forth. What was it like being in the trenches, as it were, the control room during all of this?

LUNNEY: Well, it was very exciting and very rewarding. Actually, when we got to the flight itself, it was like the culmination of a long-term experience that had gone on for about four or five years of working with the counterparts in the Soviet Union on this program and it felt like, it felt like a culmination.

I don't look back and see the flight as one event in isolation, but rather as the end of a process that was four years long.

O'BRIEN: Of course, there was a 20 year hiatus before the U.S. and the Russians got together again in space, this time the shuttle docking at Mir and of course that was the first phase of what is a three phase program to build this international space station. It's interesting that it took that long to get back together in space, but I'm curious what your assessment is on the nature and how robust this partnership is currently.

LUNNEY: Well, I think that both countries have bitten off a very major cooperative effort. Up until that time, up until the time the Russians were introduced to the international space station, it was a more, I would say, modest and something that was under some more reasonable control with all the international partners.

But the Russians ended up representing a very large contribution to the space station program and then, therefore, a lot of integration and complications that arise from having so much hardware and to some degree dependence on the contributions from the Russian side.

O'BRIEN: Just briefly before you get away, as we, you were talking, we saw the launch this past week of a key Russian piece of that space station. I'm curious, it was more than two years later and there's a lot of concern about the Russian's ability to contribute to this partnership. What do you think? Can they come through? LUNNEY: Well, I think the fact that the launch was two years late is an indication of the trouble and the difficulties that they are having internally. What I have heard from people who are actively involved in this, though, is that they are still driven by a very strong pride in their manned space program and I would expect that they would continue to find a way to support their program into the future. I expect also that they will occasionally, or maybe more often than that, still have some difficulties that derive from the fact that they just are not funded properly.

O'BRIEN: Glynn Lunney, who was with NASA before it was NASA, even, and is now a full-time grandfather and works on his handicap a little bit. Good to see you from Houston and we hope to see you soon.

LUNNEY: Thank you, Miles. Our pleasure.

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