Final: - Conspiracy Theorists Hugely Important Photo from Apollo Programme Era.

[Robert Bruce]

In the first part of this story, I alluded to the existence of a photo which could prove to be of great value to conspiracists. Here it is!


Photo:  Apollo astronauts and Soyuz 9 crew at a backyard party 28th Oct 1970: (left-to-right) Armstrong, Aldrin (obscured), Anders, Nikolayev, McDivitt, Conrad, Cunningham, Stafford, Swigert, Gordon, Schweickart, Scott, Lovell, Slayton, and Sevastyanov. Photo research by Jim Murray and Peter Duncan. Scan by Kipp Teague.

The photo is a memento of a backyard braai held in America only 3 months after the drama of Apollo 13. The gathering was attended by most of the Apollo moon mission astronauts with three guests. One guest is Deke Slayton standing second right wearing a white turtleneck sweater.

Deke was one of the original Mercury Seven, the first squad of America's finest pilots to be trained as astronauts to launch America into the Space Race with Russia. Unfortunately for Deke, he never flew into space with either the Mercury or Gemini programs. He was prime crew for the second orbital Mercury mission. But a pre-flight medical found a heart murmur and he was grounded. Hot on the tails of NASA grounding him, was the Air Force who followed NASA's lead. So he resigned his commission and was employed in a civilian capacity by NASA as "...head of astronaut selection. Unofficially called "chief astronaut," he had the decisive role in choosing the crews for the Gemini and Apollo programs...."

Happily for Deke, after a tortuous medical programme he did get to go into space as docking module pilot on the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project thus becoming the oldest person to fly into space at age 51. John Glenn at 77yrs old broke Deke's record n 29 October 1998 aboard space shuttle Discovery.

Let's return to the braai.

The group picture reveals the presence of two Soviet cosmonauts. On the left is Cosmonaut Andriyan Grigoryevich Nikolayev (1929-2004) and on the extreme right next to Deke Slayton is Vitaly Ivanovich Sevastyanov (1935-2010).

These two very brave men had recently set the world record for remaining in space orbiting the Earth. Their mission on Soyuz-9 lasted an incredible 18 days.  Launched: 1st June 1970 19:00:00 UTC – Landed: 19th June 1970 11:58:55 UTC. For the '70's this was a giant leap in terms of space flight duration, exploration and experimentation.

Here they are below in the very cramped Soyuz-9 carrying out an experiment. Nikolayev is wearing his white flight comms cap and Sevastyanov is bare-chested.



The significance of this American/Soviet party proving that while the Cold War was still in effect and distrust between the two nations was made abundantly clear, there was a secret which may have been known to the two space agencies and remained a closely guarded secret right up to the break-up of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

But what were two famous cosmonauts doing drinking whiskey with their American counterparts on 28th October 1970 so soon after Apollo 13 and their own record-breaking long-duration spaceflight?

Stay tuned!

Courtesy NASA and Wikipedia