With Cold War relations slowly thawing, the Americans invited the Soviets to participate in a joint space mission culminating in the docking of an Apollo space craft with a Soyouz craft at an altitude of 250 km. On 17 July 1975, astronaut Thomas Stafford and cosmonaut Alexis Leonov shook hands in space. Quite apart from the considerable technical challenge, this meeting illustrated the symbolic coming together of two super powers. The world had to wait until 1995 and the docking of the Atlantis with the Russian space station MIR for the next handshake in space.