In 1993, Russia joined the USA and its partners in the largest cooperative space exploration effort in history - the International Space Station. This documentary covers the following stages of the process:
-Gore and Chernomyrdin signing the 1993 treaty;
-the STS-60 mission, launched in February 1994, a NASA mission which included a Russian cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev; footage of in-flight biomedical investigations;
-the February 1995 STS-63 mission, involving a rendezvous between the Russian space station Mir and the American shuttle Orbiter; various footage of both craft, astronauts waving, Russian and American mission control centres;
-the Mir 18 mission, launched on March 14th 1995, during which an American astronaut (Norm Thagard) stayed onboard the Mir for three and a half months; the launch, Thagard aboard Soyuz rocket, being welcomed aboard the shuttle, in-flight biomedical experiments and EVA;
-the STS-71 mission - docking of the Orbiter American space shuttle with Mir: the vehicles, docking capture

begin
00:03:14:00 NASA logo
00:03:19:00 title sequence: The International Space Station Programme: The First Step
00:03:28:00 ls Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin sign the US/Russian Joint Statement Space Agreement
00:03:40:00 ms Gore and Chernomyrdin shake hands
00:03:54:00 ls Gore and Golden in Russian rocket assembly area
00:04:03:00 mcu commander Charlie Bolden, Ron Sega; pan r to cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev in Orbiter trainer
00:04:11:00 mls STS-60 crew walking out of O and C building at KSC to astro van
00:04:28:00 cu cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev conducting the sensory-motor investigation experiment
00:04:35:00 ls mission specialist Ron Sega helping Jan Davis with the sensory-motor investigation experiment
00:04:39:00 ms Krikalev places a computer disc in the Space Acceleration Measurement System (SAMS) experiment
00:04:49:00 mls STS-63 shuttle launch
00:04:54:00 els shuttle tracking; shot from press site
00:05:02:00 ls Mir 17 Space Station, Earth below
00:05