Civilian cosmonaut helped thaw Cold War in space
Valeri Nikolayevich Kubasov, b Vyazniki, Soviet Union, January 7, 1935, m Ludmilla Kurovskaya, 1s, 1d; d Moscow February 19, 2014, aged 79.
IT WAS as bizarre as it was heroic. Across the world the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a military and ideological struggle for supremacy: arming proxy combatants, infiltrating intelligence networks, preparing for nuclear armageddon.
Yet high above the Earth, on July 15, 1975, two experienced Soviet cosmonauts nudged their Soyuz 19 spacecraft against the American Apollo command module, unlocked the hatches and clambered aboard. Billions of astonished television viewers watched Thomas Stafford and his American crew shake hands with Commander Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov. An inscription from Shakespeare, greeting the visitors, summed up this new reconciliation in space: ‘‘Brave new world that has such people in it’’.
Minutes later, the two Soviet cosmonauts were astonished to be connected directly by radio to President Gerald Ford, who congratulated them on an achievement that was the most spectacular fruit of the new SovietAmerican policy of detente. It was an achievement that began a series of co-operative projects in space, culminating in the construction of the International Space Station, still regularly visited by Russian and American space crews.
Little wonder, therefore, that the death of Mr Kubasov, the flight engineer and the most senior Soviet civilian cosmonaut, evoked particular sadness in the US. The Association of Space Explorers called him: ‘‘A true pioneer of space flight and international cooperation in space’’.
The Soyuz and Apollo spacecraft remained linked in orbit for two days, while the Russians – after months of intensive training in English before blast-off – got to know the three-man American crew, exchanged gifts and carried out joint experiments. Mr Kubasov and Vance Brand, an American astronaut, made a joint broadcast from aboard Soyuz, during which Mr Kubasov wondered aloud to his American audience which of their nations was the most beautiful. He diplomatically concluded that neither possessed the majesty of ‘‘our blue planet’’.
On the ground, commentators were quick to highlight the significance. Tom Brokaw, the US television presenter, later called the mission a perfect symbol of the historic changes in a world of deeply divided ideologies and nuclear threats. ‘‘We went from pointing missiles at each other to exploring the heavens together – and the men who pulled it off, cosmonauts and astronauts, all had the right stuff.’’
Mr Kubasov had already demonstrated that stuff during his first space flight six years earlier. In October 1969 he began a fiveday mission aboard Soyuz 6 that was intended to rendezvous with two other orbiting Soviet space capsules. But the failure of the Igla (‘‘Needle’’) docking device, together with excessive use of altitude-control propellant and other technical problems prevented a docking.
As the three craft drifted apart, Mr Kubasov and a fellow cosmonaut left the Soyuz to attempt to weld together in space samples of stainless steel and titanium.
Unfortunately the welding arc had inadvertently been pointed at the orbiting module, almost burning a hole in it. Upon opening the hatch, the cosmonauts were shocked to discover the damage, and, fearing a depressurisation, they retreated back to the descent module. Luckily, Soyuz 6 landed safely.
Depressurisation was later a danger all too familiar to Soviet spacemen. Following his first mission, Mr Kubasov began training to fly aboard the newly built Soviet Salyut space station. He had been due to attempt, again with Mr Leonov, the first link-up with the station, but days before the launch, he was found to have a swelling on his right lung. Fearing tuberculosis, the entire crew was replaced by back-ups.
It turned out that the swelling had been caused instead by an allergy to a chemical insecticide used to spray trees. Mr Kubasov and Mr Leonov were furious at being dropped, but it was too late for the crew to be changed again. The replacement crew undertook the mission instead, but on the return to Earth on June 29, 1971, Soyuz 11 suffered a valve malfunction and all the oxygen was drained from the spacecraft. The three-man crew died.
SEVERAL launch vehicle failures followed, and Mr Kubasov and Mr Leonov had to be stood down twice from aborted missions before the historic rendezvous with Apollo.
Even then, there were mishaps. Just before reaching orbit, one of the spacecraft’s television cameras failed. Renowned as a handyman in space, Mr Kubasov worked fruitlessly to repair it.
‘‘On our return to Earth,’’ Mr Leonov later wrote, ‘‘this prompted a hilarious mailbag of requests from fellow Soviet citizens wanting Kubasov and me to come and fix their television sets’’.
Mr Kubasov’s third and final mission in space was part of the much-touted Soviet Interkosmos programme which included cosmonauts from other communist and Warsaw Pact countries. Promoted to commander, he blasted off for the Salyut 6 space station in May 1980 with a Hungarian crew-mate, Bertalan Farkas.
Perhaps to justify the propaganda aspects of these international flights, the two were set so many photography and life sciences tasks to perform during their eight-day mission that they averaged only about three hours sleep. The only hitch was a failure of an altimeter during the final seconds of their descent, which caused the solid-fuel retrorockets to fail, giving them a harsh thump on touchdown.
All in all, Mr Kubasov spent 18 days, 17 hours and 57 minutes in space during his three missions.
He was born into a worker’s family in Vyazniki, a small town east of Moscow, in 1935. He graduated, with a gold medal, from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1958 as an aerospace engineer and was picked to work with Sergei Korolev, the celebrated Soviet rocket engineer. One of his assignments was to calculate the trajectory of a future mission to Mars. Focusing first on ballistic studies, Mr Kubasov also worked on the design of the Voskhod capsule that he and Mr Leonov would later fly, before being recruited to the corps of cosmonauts – a rare honour for a civilian.
Mr Kubasov, earnest, hardworking and serious, was popular with his fellow spacemen. Mr Leonov remembers him as ‘‘highly educated, a competent engineer and delicate person’’, with whom it was easy to work. They occasionally quarrelled but were quick to make up. Mr Kubasov was, however, ‘‘very serious’’, did not enjoy jokes and could rarely get those told to him.
However, Mr Leonov persuaded him to play at least one practical joke on the Americans.
While still on Earth, they prepared stickers saying ‘‘Stolichnaya’’ and ‘‘Russkaya Vodka’’, and attached them to tubes. As they sat down with the Americans during their rendezvous, the Russians insisted on the usual toast before eating. The sober Americans were very reluctant. They finally opened their tubes and took a drink. Instead of vodka, they found they were gulping down borscht soup.