Do you remember Apollo-Soyuz? The Mars Viking landers? And the beginnings of the Shuttle program? All under President Ford's watch. Here is the Space.com article here.
On July 17, 1975, Gen. Thomas Stafford and Col. Alexei Leonov met in the middle, between their docked Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, and heralded a new era of space travel and cooperation.
Later, Astronauts Vance Brand and Donald "Deke" Slayton, along with cosmonaut Valery Kubasov joined them for two days of scientific experiments and goodwill exchanges.
"Flying this mission required more than technological know-how," said NASA Administrator Dan Goldin. "It required courage, diplomacy, hardheaded perseverance and good humor -- not unlike what is necessary for the International Space Station."
Apollo-Soyuz not only set the stage for the Shuttle-Mir program, where astronauts flew aboard the Russian station Mir, but also provided what will likely be the template for an era of space exploration that takes us beyond Earth orbit.
And a year later the Viking I and II lands on Mars:
Viking was an ambitious mission. Altogether there were four spacecraft, two orbiters and two landers. Each orbiter and lander flew as a coupled pair from Earth to Mars, and separated in Mars orbit when the lander was ready to descend to the Martian surface. The twin Viking orbiters had cameras, an infrared thermal mapper, and a Mars atmospheric water detector. In addition to instrumentation to measure the composition and structure of the Martian atmosphere during descent, the Viking landers carried a full suite of sophisticated science experiments, including cameras, a meteorology boom, three biological instruments, separate organic and inorganic chemistry experiments, and a seismometer. Although the primary purpose of the landed mission was the search for life, the characterization of the Martian surface was also of great scientific importance.
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