Valery Bykovsky Cosmonaut who held the record for the longest solo space flight
MAJOR-GENERAL VALERY BYKOVSKY, who has died aged 84, was a pioneering Soviet cosmonaut and the 11th human to fly in space, in 1963. At his death he was the earliest space traveller still alive – a baton which has now passed to the first woman to orbit the Earth, Valentina Tereshkova.
The first of his three space flights was Vostok 5, launched into orbit on June 14 1963 from the steppes of Kazakhstan amid much speculation that a joint flight with another craft was planned. Two days later, Valentina Tereshkova duly followed Bykovsky into orbit on Vostok 6.
The capsules passed within three miles of one another but were not designed to manoeuvre, so no rendezvous was possible. Instead Bykovsky, whose call-sign was “Hawk”, and Tereshkova (“Seagull”) spoke to one another by radio.
Bykovsky returned to Earth a few hours after Tereshkova on June 19, after spending five days in space. He originally planned to remain in orbit for eight days but was ordered home early due to hazardous solar flare activity. However, his curtailed mission still holds the record for the longest solo space flight.
After a gap of 13 years, Bykovsky returned to space in 1976 as commander of Soyuz 22, with flight engineer Vladimir Aksynov. Their eight-day mission was to study the Earth’s geology from orbit with a multispectral camera. They also observed the behaviour of fish in weightlessness in a small aquarium.
Bykovsky’s last space flight was Soyuz 31 in 1978. His co-pilot was Sigmund Jähn of East Germany, flying as part of the Interkosmos programme which took other nationalities from the Soviet bloc into space. This project achieved considerable propaganda value, as until that year all space fliers had been Russian or American.
The flight caused consternation and embarrassment in West Germany, since Jähn was an air force officer from their ideological opponent, the German Democratic Republic. The East German press tended to ignore the existence of its wealthier and technically advanced neighbour and shied away from any sense of German nationalism. However, on this rare occasion a headline in the party newspaper
Neues Deutschland proudly proclaimed: “The first German in Space – a Citizen of the GDR”.
The pair spent eight days in orbit, visiting the Salyut 6 space station and conducting experiments in remote sensing, medicine and biology. They swapped spacecraft and Bykovksy piloted Jähn back to Earth aboard Soyuz 29.
Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky was born in the town of Pavlovsky Posad, 40 miles outside Moscow, on August 2 1934. He was the second child of Fyodor Fyodorovich Bykovsky and Klavdia Ivanova. In the 1940s his father’s career at the Ministry of Railways took the family to Samara, then to Tehran.
Returning to Moscow as a teenager, Bykovsky wanted to enter the navy, but his father encouraged him to stay on at school. A lecture about the Soviet Air Force Club set his mind on becoming a pilot.
He graduated from the Kachinsk Military Aviation Academy as lieutenant, becoming a jet pilot and parachute instructor in the Soviet Air Force. He qualified in 1961 as one of the elite group of six selected for the first Russian space flights, three months before Yuri Gagarin’s historic launch.
His first role was as a back-up on Vostok 3, and Bykovsky’s turn came the following year. His subsequent 13-year absence from space is explained by his assignment to Soyuz 2
– cancelled after Vladimir Komarov died aboard Soyuz 1 – then being transferred to the secret moon landing programme, abandoned when the US landed in 1969.
Bykovsky married Valentina Mikhailovna Sukhova, and the couple had two sons; the first died in an aviation accident in 1986, and he retired in 1990.