Soyuz 28

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mission Insignia

Mission Statistics

Mission Name:	Soyuz 28
Call Sign:	Зенит ("Zenith")
Crew:	Aleksei Gubarev Vladimír Remek
Launch:	March 2, 1978 15:28 UTC Baikonur LC1
Landing:	March 10, 1978 13:44 UTC 51° N, 67° E
Duration:	7 days, 22 hours and 17 minutes

[edit] Crew

Aleksei Gubarev (2)
Vladimír Remek - Czechoslovakia (1)

[edit] Mission parameters

Mass: 6800 kg
Perigee: 198.9 km
Apogee: 275.6 km
Inclination: 51.65°
Period: 88.95 minutes

Soyuz 28 was launched March 2, 1978, and was the third mission to dock with Salyut 6. Vladimír Remek was also the first person launched into space who was not a citizen of the United States or the Soviet Union. It was the first mission in the Intercosmos program that gave Eastern Bloc and other Communist countries access to space through manned and unmanned launches.

They docked with Salyut 6, which was already occupied by Georgi Grechko and Yuri Romanenko. Like all Intercosmos missions it was 7 days and 21.5 hours plus minus 1 hour in length. This meant that no country could be offended by the fact that such and such a country had a longer flight and possibly perceive that the Soviet Union liked that country more.

The mission was mostly for propaganda purposes. The 4 crew members on Salyut 6 received messages from Leonid Brezhnev and Gustáv Husák, the leader of Czechoslovakia. It was hoped that the Intercosmos flights would help prop up some of the failing communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc. Husák was unpopular in Czechoslovakia after reversing the reforms of his predecessor (who had been ousted by Warsaw Pact countries). Romanenko spoke on behalf of the crew saying:

"We shall apply all our strengths and knowledge to defend the great honour of this international crew, which has started to carry our this joint program of socialist countries' research and utilisation of outer space for peaceful purposes."

As for experiments these were standardised over all the Intercosmos missions. There was a variety of cardiovascular and medical experiments, some multispectral photography of the visitors home country and one or two experiments developed by scientists in the visiting cosmonauts country. In Remek's case these were material processing.

The time was agony for one of the long duration crew members, Romanenko. He had developed an excruciating toothache and there was little that they could do on the station. All that the doctors at mission control could suggest was that he washed his mouth with warm water and keep warm. By the end of the mission (they landed only six days after the Soyuz 28 crew), a nerve had been exposed.

Most of the guest cosmonauts were trained as military pilots within the Soviet Union and spoke excellent Russian. Despite that a joke appeared soon after the mission that Remek's hand had mysteriously turned red after the mission. He informed the doctors that this was because every time he went to touch something, the Russian crewmembers would slap his hand and yell, "Don't touch that!"

The crew landed 135 km north of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan in the Soyuz 28 spacecraft.