Apollo–Soyuz Test Project made the Soviet Union's policy of détente official in his 1956 doctrine of peaceful coexistence at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the two nations seemed to be in perpetual conflict. Due to tense relations, space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was unlikely in the early 1970s. On June 7, 1971, the USSR had launched the first piloted orbital space station, Salyut 1. Meanwhile, the United States had launched the Apollo 14 mission several months prior, the third spacecraft to land humans on the moon. Each side gave the other little
Apollo 12 control assumed by Conrad during the final few hundred feet of descent. Unlike Apollo 11, where Neil Armstrong had to use the manual control to direct his lander downrange of the computer's target which was strewn with boulders, Apollo 12 succeeded in landing at its intended target – within walking distance of the "Surveyor 3" probe, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967. This was the first – and, to date, only – occasion in which humans have "caught up" to a probe sent to land on another world. Conrad actually landed "Intrepid" short of "Pete's Parking Lot",