Soyuz 11 - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Crew

Mission

Parameters of the mission

Mass: 6790 kg
Perigee: 163 km
Apogee: 237 km
Slope: 51.5°
Period: 88.4 minutes

The vessel was launched on June 6th, 1971, since the base of Baïkonour, Kazakhstan. A few months before, the first mission in direction of Salyut 1, Soyuz 10, had failed to moor with the station. The crew of Soyuz 11 there makes a success of and spent 22 days on board, establishing at the time a record of duration of flight which will be beaten only with the mission Skylab 2, in May - June 1973.

While penetrating in the station, the crew immediately detected a smell of burning, which they drove out by repairing the ventilation system, that they let turn one day lasting whereas they waited in their capsule. Their stay on Salyut was productive, including retransmissions on line on television. Notable fact for the time, the Pravda regularly gave news of the unfolding of the mission.
After 11 days, a starting point of fire on an electrical installation was controlled by the crew, making consider one moment the abandonment of the station

Died of the crew

The June 30th 1971, after an apparently normal re-entry of the capsule, the team of recovery found the crew died at the time of the opening of Soyouz.
After investigation, it appeared that the cause of death was a defective valve which had opened whereas the module of descent separated from the module of service, killing the crew by asphyxiation, whereas the atmosphere of the cabin escaped in the espace.
This valve planned for the atmospheric pressure balancing a few moments before the landing measured only one millimetre in diameter and was located under the seats of the cosmonauts. It was calculated that the air of the cabin had to escape in approximately 30 seconds, at an altitude of 168 km. During these second crucial, Patsayev realized of this problem and was detached from its seat to try to close again the valve or to block it, but to no purpose: it would have been necessary for him to have one minute to manually close again the valve, which one found with half closed. Dobrovolsky and Volkov, strapped in the narrow space of the capsule, were virtually impotent to help their companion.

Deprived of air during the 15 minutes which the descent lasted, they were well beyond any help when the team of recovery discovered them and proceeded to the techniques of artificial respiration, as testify the video documents to them to the time.

He was given to the three victims of imposing national funeral, and they were all three buried in the walls of the the Kremlin, on the Red Place, with Moscow. The astronaut Thomas Stafford was one of the carriers of the coffins of the cosmonautes.

After this dramatic accident, the Soyuz capsule was entirely redrawn. In order to avoid a repetition of this drama, the cosmonauts covered a light spacesuit at the time of the phases of take-off and landing, which forced, for reasons of place, to reduce the number of the embarked team members of 3 to 2.
A new version of the vessel, Soyuz-T (T for " triplace"), in 1980, again allowed to send crews of 3 men, also in spacesuit.

The crew

The crew tragically deceased in this accident was the crew of réserve.
The crew initially envisaged was trained of the cosmonauts Alexei Leonov, Valeri Kubasov and Pyotr Kolodin. Four days before launching, an examination with the X-rays let think that Kubasov could present symptoms of tuberculosis, which designated the crew of reserve as crew of vol. It was the first flight of Dobrovolski and Patsayev.

After the failure of the placing in orbit of Salyut 2, Kubasov and Leonov were assigned with the flight Soyuz-19, at the time of the mission Apollo-Soyouz in 1975.

Homages

The numbered asteroids 1789 to 1791 were baptized in homage to the three cosmonauts. Their names were also given to 3 lunar craters.

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