Accidents and emergencies on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Accidents and emergencies on Russian Soyuz spacecraft In what year did the Soyuz crew die 11

Warm June day in 1971. The descent vehicle of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft made the planned landing. In the mission control center, everyone applauded, looking forward to the crew going on the air. At that moment, no one suspected that the biggest tragedy in its history would soon shake the Soviet cosmonautics.

Long flight preparation

In the period from 1957 to 1975, there was a tense rivalry between the USSR and the USA in the field of space exploration. After three unsuccessful launches of the N-1 rocket, it became clear that the Soviet Union had lost to the Americans in the lunar race. Work in this direction was quietly covered up, concentrating on the construction of orbital stations.

The first Salyut spacecraft was successfully launched into orbit in the winter of 1971. The next goal was divided into four stages: to prepare the crew, send it to the station, successfully dock with it, and then conduct a series of studies in outer space for several weeks.

The docking of the first Soyuz 10 was unsuccessful due to malfunctions in the docking port. Nevertheless, the astronauts managed to return to Earth, and their task fell on the shoulders of the next crew.

Its commander, Alexei Leonov, visited the design bureau every day and was looking forward to the launch. However, fate decreed otherwise. Three days before the flight, flight engineer Valery Kubasov's doctors discovered a strange spot on a lung scan. There was no time left to clarify the diagnosis, and it was necessary to urgently look for a replacement.

The question of who will now fly into space was decided in power circles. The State Commission made its choice at the very last moment, only 11 hours before the launch. Her decision was extremely unexpected: the crew was completely changed, and now Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsaev were sent into space.

Life on "Salyut-1": what awaited the astronauts on the OKS "Salyut"

The Soyuz 11 was launched on June 6, 1971 from the Baikonur cosmodrome. At that time, pilots went into space in conventional flight suits, because the design of the ship did not involve the use of space suits. With any leakage of oxygen, the crew was doomed.

The next day after the launch, a difficult stage of docking began. On the morning of June 7, the program responsible for approaching the Salyut station turned on on the remote control. When no more than 100 meters were left to it, the crew switched to manual control of the ship and an hour later successfully docked with the OKS.

"Soyuz-11 crew.

After that, a new stage of space exploration began - now there was a full-fledged scientific station in orbit. Dobrovolsky relayed the news of the successful docking to Earth, and his team proceeded to reopen the premises.

The schedule of the astronauts was detailed. Every day they conducted research and biomedical experiments. Television reports were regularly made with the Earth directly from the station.

On June 26 (that is, exactly 20 days later), the Soyuz 11 crew became a new record holder in terms of flight range and duration of stay in space. There are 4 days left until the end of their mission. Communication with the Control Center was stable, and nothing boded trouble.

The way home and the tragic death of the crew

On June 29, the order came to end the mission. The crew transferred all research records to the Soyuz 11 and took their places. The undocking was successful, as Dobrovolsky reported to the Control Center. Everyone was in high spirits. Vladislav Volkov even joked on the air: "See you on Earth, and prepare cognac."

After disconnection, the flight went according to plan. The braking unit was launched in time, and the descent vehicle separated from the main compartment. After that, communication with the crew stopped.

Those who were expecting astronauts on Earth were not particularly alarmed by this. When the ship enters the atmosphere, a wave of plasma rolls over its skin and the communication antennas burn. Just a regular situation, communication should resume soon.

The parachute opened strictly on schedule, but "Yantari" (this is the call sign of the crew) was still silent. The silence on the air began to strain. After the landing apparatus landed, rescuers and doctors almost immediately ran up to it. There was no reaction to the knock on the skin, so the hatch had to be opened in emergency mode.

A terrible picture appeared before my eyes: Dobrovolsky, Patsaev and Volkov were sitting dead in their chairs. The tragedy shocked everyone with its inexplicability. After all, the landing went according to plan, and until recently the astronauts got in touch. Death occurred from an almost instantaneous air leak. However, what caused it was not yet known.

A special commission restored literally in seconds what actually happened. It turned out that during landing, the crew discovered an air leak through the ventilation valve above the commander's seat.

They didn’t have time to close it: it took 55 seconds for a healthy person, and there were no spacesuits and even oxygen masks in the equipment.

The medical commission found traces of cerebral hemorrhage and damage to the eardrums in all the dead. The air dissolved in the blood literally boiled and clogged the vessels, even getting into the chambers of the heart.

To search for a technical malfunction that caused the valve to depressurize, the commission conducted more than 1000 experiments with the involvement of the manufacturer. In parallel, the KGB worked out a variant of deliberate sabotage.

However, none of these versions has been confirmed. Elementary negligence in production played its role here. Checking the condition of the Soyuz, it turned out that many nuts were simply not tightened in the right way, which led to valve failure.

The day after the tragedy, all the newspapers of the USSR came out with black mourning frames, and any space flights were stopped for 28 months. Now spacesuits were included in the obligatory equipment of astronauts, but at the cost of this were the lives of three pilots who never saw the bright summer sun on their native Earth.

1971

Their farewell.

Commander Georgy Dobrovolsky, 43 years old, from Odessa, during the occupation of the city by the Romanians, an underground worker, was arrested, escaped with the help of local residents, a member of the second composition of the cosmonaut detachment.

Research Engineer Victor Patsaev, 38 years old, from Aktobe, in 1955 he graduated from the Penza Industrial Institute, now the Penza State Institute. The man who in 1955 headed the department that Patsaev graduated from took an exam from my son.

Flight engineer Vladimir Volkov, 35 years old, Muscovite, the youngest, but also the most experienced - two years before that he flew as a flight engineer on the Soyuz-7 during the group flight of the Soyuz under the numbers "6", "7" and "8".

Soyuz-11 launched on June 6 and the next day managed to successfully dock to the first Soviet space orbital station Salyut-1. A month and a half earlier, the Soyuz-10 spacecraft had already tried to dock with it, but. This time everything went well. True, the ventilation unit did not work well at the station, but it was repaired.

From the blog, 1971

After that, the crew proceeded to the planned work. The stay at the station was productive and included a TV link to the Earth. However, on the 11th day, a fire broke out, and it was decided to stop the flight and leave the station. In this regard, observation from orbit over the takeoff of the N-1 rocket was canceled.

At the end of the work period, on June 29, 1971, Soyuz-11 began to prepare for descent. When the hatch was closed, the banner "Hatch open" continued to burn. The MCC suggested a breakdown of the sensor on the edge of the hatch, the crew blocked it and checked the tightness by relieving pressure in the amenity compartment.

June 29 at 21:25:15 DMV Soyuz-11 separated from the station. The ship's commander reported this to the MCC.

On June 30, at 01:35:24 UTC, the ship's engine was switched on for braking and worked for the specified time.

01:47:28 DMV, the ship compartments were separated, communication with the crew was interrupted.

01:54 UTC air defense tracking stations detected SA 2200 km from the estimated landing site.

02:02:54 DMV, at an altitude of about 7 km, the main parachute of the SA opened up, it was soon discovered by the meeting helicopters, the crew did not get in touch.

02:16:52 the soft landing engines fired, the flight ended in the assigned area. The search party found the crew with no signs of life. Resuscitation measures were carried out, which were unsuccessful: tissue damage due to decompression sickness was incompatible with life. A subsequent autopsy showed the presence of air bubbles throughout the circulatory system of the astronauts, air in the chambers of the heart, as well as bursting eardrums.

All transmitters and receivers were turned off in the Soyuz-11 cockpit. The shoulder belts of all three crew members were unfastened, and Dobrovolsky's belts were mixed up and only the upper belt lock was fastened. One of the two ventilation valves was in the open position. This valve is normally opened during parachuting to equalize the outboard atmospheric pressure with the pressure in the descent vehicle. No other deviations from the norm were found.

To investigate the causes of the disaster, a government commission was created chaired by Academician Mstislav Keldysh.

An analysis of the recordings of the autonomous recorder of onboard measurements "Mir" showed that from the moment the compartments were separated at an altitude of more than 150 km, the pressure in the SA began to decrease sharply, and within 115 seconds it dropped to 50 mm Hg. Art. The rate of pressure reduction corresponded to the open vent valve. The commission came to an unambiguous conclusion: during the separation of the compartments, the ventilation valve opened prematurely and unauthorized. As a result, the descent vehicle depressurized, and this led to the death of the astronauts.

This ventilation valve was normally opened at a safe height by detonating a squib. According to the memoirs of B. Chertok, the presumed cause of premature operation of the valve opening squib was a shock wave propagating through the metal of the descent vehicle body. The shock wave was generated by the explosion of squibs separating the compartments of the Soyuz spacecraft. However, subsequent ground tests failed to reproduce this hypothesis. Numerous explosions of squibs did not cause detonation of the squib, which opens the ventilation valves. Therefore, this incident was proposed to be considered a hard-to-reproduce and unlikely event. However, the design of the ventilation valves has been improved in the future.

The position of the bodies of the crew members indicated that they were trying to eliminate the leak, however, in the extreme conditions of the fog that filled the cabin after depressurization, severe pain throughout the body due to acute decompression sickness and quickly lost hearing due to burst eardrums, the astronauts did not close that valve and lost time on this. When Georgy Dobrovolsky (according to other sources, Viktor Patsaev) discovered the true cause of the depressurization, he did not have enough time to eliminate it.

In addition, the location of the valve and control knobs was such that it was necessary to leave the chair to work with them. This shortcoming was pointed out by test pilots, for whom this is unacceptable.

The disaster was followed by a 27-month break in Soyuz spacecraft launches (the next Soyuz-12 manned spacecraft was launched on September 27, 1973). During this time, many concepts have been revised: the layout of the ship's controls has changed, becoming more ergonomic; ascent and descent operations began to be carried out only in spacesuits, the crew began to consist of two people (in part, the place of the third crew member was taken by the installation of autonomous support for the life of light spacesuits, in which a significant volume was occupied by cylinders with a supply of compressed oxygen).

Viktor Patsaev is the only graduate of Penza universities to become an astronaut. Alexander Samokutyaev, the first cosmonaut born in Penza, studied at the Polytechnic University for only a year.

The memory of the dead cosmonauts was immortalized in Moscow (Cosmonaut Volkov Street) and Odessa (Dobrovolsky Avenue). The memory of Patsaev is immortalized in the names of streets throughout the former USSR, a bust was erected to him in Aktobe, and in Penza there is Patsaev Street, a memorial plaque was installed on the first building of the Polytechnic University.

Georgy Timofeevich Dobrovolsky

Born in Odessa in a working class family in 1928, he grew up without a father. The war caught the future astronaut at the age of 13. George dug trenches, put out lighters, helped defend his native city, and when Odessa was finally surrendered, he decided to fight the invaders in the ranks of the underground. He got a gun, but did not have time to use it. He was captured during a raid, beaten and sentenced to 25 years hard labor for carrying weapons. Shortly before the liberation of the city, he managed to escape and hide using false documents. After the war, he entered the Odessa Air Force Special School, became a good military pilot, and in January 1963 he was enlisted in the cosmonaut corps. Intensely, with full dedication, he studied the wisdom of the new “space” business for all 8 years until that fateful day when the State Commission approved him as the commander of the crew of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft and the orbital manned scientific station Salyut.

On June 30, 1971, the descent vehicle of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft landed. Joyful applause erupted in the Mission Control Center. No one imagined that the biggest tragedy in its history awaited the Soviet cosmonautics. Three astronauts were found dead. What happened on the spacecraft? Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov, Georgy Grechko, Vladimir Shatalov and others talk about it.

Television company "Ostankino" commissioned by the TRC "Petersburg-5 Channel".

Director: Sergey Kozhevnikov. Release year: 2008

From the diaries of N.P. Kamanin ("Hidden Space")

An analysis of the investigation materials at my disposal - recordings of the Mir on-board equipment, telemetry data, an act on the state of the cabin, a medical report on the cause of death of the cosmonauts - allows us to imagine what could have happened on board the Soyuz-11 within 25-30 seconds after separating its compartments.

The working cycle of the TDU is ending, the crew feels an increase in overloads - which means that the ship has gone downhill. Everything is fine on board, but the cosmonauts, remembering the recent troubles with the transfer hatch, keep an eye on the pressure in the cabin. Cotton is heard - there is a division! But what is it? The pressure in the cabin begins to drop rapidly... Depressurization! Having unfastened his seat belts, Dobrovolsky rushes to the hatch. The hatch is airtight, but the pressure continues to fall, and the whistle of air escaping into space is heard. Because of the noise of the included transmitters and receivers, it is impossible to understand: where is the air whistling? Volkov and Patsaev unfasten their shoulder straps and turn off the radio equipment. The whistle of air is heard above the commander's seat - where the ventilation valve is located. Dobrovolsky and Patsaev try to close the valve, but, exhausted, fall into chairs. Dobrovolsky, losing consciousness, still manages to fasten the belt lock of the tangled belts ... "

Soviet cosmonautics, with all its successes and failures, developed in an atmosphere of complete secrecy and disinformation. Now archives are being opened, memoirs are being published, memoirs are being published, and foreign sources of information are becoming available. It became possible not only to learn something previously unknown, but to compare and analyze. Reveal inaccuracies, and sometimes lies.

Here are excerpts from five different sources about the events associated with the completion of the flight of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft. On the state of communication with the "Soyuz" on the descent and on the participation (more precisely, non-participation) of the SKI OMER vessels accompanied by the descent.

1) B. Chertok. "Rockets and People":

« The command to undock was to be issued on June 29 at 21:25. After separation from the station, two turns are taken away to prepare for the descent. The activation of the SKTDU for braking will take place at 01:47 on June 30.

Everything went smoothly and according to schedule. Marine ship points received information from a spacecraft flying over them and promptly reported that the deceleration engine worked at the estimated time and was turned off from the integrator.

After turning off the engine, the spacecraft left the communication zone with the ships in the Atlantic. There was a division over Africa."

2) N.P. Kamanin, "Hidden space":

According to the descent program, the TDU should turn on at 01:35:24 and turn off after 187 seconds. Everyone is looking forward to reports on turning the TDU on and off, Shatalov persistently calls the Yantar for communication, but the crew is silent ... there is no division. It is not clear whether Soyuz-11 went down or did it stay in orbit? There comes a communication session time (01:49:37-02:04:07), provided for in case the spacecraft has not deorbited. Oppressive silence reigns in the hall - there is still no communication with the crew and no new data on the Soyuz-11. Everyone understands that something happened on the ship, but what exactly, no one knows yet. The minutes of waiting are terribly slow... "

3) Retelling of an excerpt from the book Grujica S.Ivanovich “Salyut - The First Space Station. Triumph and Tragedy", Springer Praxis Publishing, UK, 2007 (pp. 268-272):

“The coordinates of the ships on the 29th are the usual for the landing turn:

Bezhitsa - 1.5°S, 13°W, Kegostrov - 22°S, 24°W

Since the landing was planned for July 1, on June 29 Bezhitsa was allowed to leave to replenish supplies, and Kegostrov was ordered to replace Bezhitsa. There was enough time to get to the point.

Mishin decided, allegedly - on the advice of ballisticians, to reduce the duration of the flight by one day and, in addition, to transfer the landing from the second (from the moment of undocking) to the third turn (why and when - it is not clear from the text).

The landing turn turned out to be 22 degrees. west. Having a theoretical radius of the communication zone of 15 degrees, but in fact - no more than 10 degrees, neither Kegostrov nor Bezhitsa saw Soyuz-11. ASC stood at Halifax and did not work on landing.

4) O.M. Pavlenko, "Ocean supports of space bridges", VVM, St. Petersburg (in preparation for publication).

“07/26/1971 in the Gulf of Guinea, the R/V Bezhitsa, having received permission, left the operating point along the Soyuz-11. It provided control of the operation of the TDU on the second landing circuit. ... NIS headed for Las Palmas. ... After 12 hours, an encryption was received ... "Immediately return to the point of work on the third landing circuit." ... Now, neither "Bezhitsa" nor "Kegostrov" could keep up with the new working point. ... Only Kegostrov could come closest to the new point 14N 22W. On June 27, he received a radiogram (follow there). He managed to get to the point 8.43N 18.09W and receive telemetry over the HF radio channel.

5) Rifat Saidgazov (Kegostrov), Novaya Kama, Yelabuga:

“On that tragic night, June 30, I, as usual, sat at my workplace in the receiving radio center, carried out auditory control over the passage of radio signals carrying telemetric information from the Soyuz-11 spacecraft ... On the penultimate turn before landing, our ship's receivers telemetry signals from the Soyuz were not received. Only my equipment recorded them, and in parallel I recorded them on magnetic tape. The signals of the last orbit on the telemetry again were not received. But they again passed and were recorded on my equipment, only for some reason with a delay of 10-15 minutes from the schedule.

Chertok writes that everything was normal and the descent vehicle is flying over Africa (!).

Kamanin is about the loss of communication.

Grujica S.Ivanovich notes oddities with the arrangement of ships. Pavlenko explains. Between them there is a discrepancy in dates.

Here is a map of the arrangement and movement of ships on the Soyuz-11 landing turn, built on the data of Grujica S.Ivanovich and O.M. Pavlenko:

It immediately catches the eye:

- "Bezhitsa", if she ran to Las Palmas, got into just the right area and on time.

- "Kegostrov" for two or three days of forced movement was not able to cover almost 2 thousand miles.

"Bezhitsa" disappeared somewhere, "Kegostrov" could only receive HF telemetry. Kamanin does not confirm telemetry reception. And Chertok - everything is OK!

Questions and assumptions arise:

What was going on in the TsUPe? Why did you decide to postpone the landing date? Was the station unsatisfactory due to smoke or fire damage? Or did they fight there, on the Soyuz?

Why was the landing turn moved? To land during daylight hours or because of delays in closing the hatch?

One gets the impression that the situation has developed so abnormally that they simply forgot about the fleet, about the need to receive telemetry signals and maintain VHF communication with the descent vehicle at the stage of braking and descent. Just to plant!

Vladislav Nikolaevich Volkov

Born in 1935 in Moscow. He got into astronauts not through the “line of pilots”, but through the “line of civilian specialists”. He studied at the Moscow Aviation Institute, worked at OKB-1 (KB Korolev), participated in the creation of many models of space technology, including the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft, in 1966 he was enrolled in the cosmonaut corps, in 1969 he made his first space flight. flight as a flight engineer of the Soyuz-7 spacecraft. He managed to write a book about space "Stepping into the sky" (1971).

Viktor Ivanovich Patsaev

Born in 1933 in Aktobe (now Aktobe, Kazakhstan). He also became a cosmonaut through “civilian specialists” (he studied at the Penza Industrial Institute, worked as an astronomer (he became the first astronomer in the world to work in space), participated in the design of instruments for meteorological rockets, and also worked in OKB-1. In 1968 he was accepted into team of astronauts.

, 1971

According to the preliminary conclusion of the doctor Anatoly Lebedev, made at the landing site, the crew died from a sharp drop in pressure in the cabin of the ship. All transmitters and receivers were turned off in the Soyuz-11 cockpit. The shoulder belts of all three crew members were unfastened, and Dobrovolsky's belts were mixed up and only the upper belt lock was fastened. One of the two ventilation valves was in the open position. This valve opens during parachuting to equalize the outboard atmospheric pressure with the pressure in the descent vehicle. No other abnormalities were found...

Crew death report. From the blog, 1971

The catastrophe was followed by a 27-month break in Soyuz launches - the next Soyuz-12 manned spacecraft was launched on September 27, 1973. During this time, many concepts have been revised: the layout of the ship's controls has changed, becoming more ergonomic; lifting and lowering operations began to be carried out only in spacesuits, the crew began to consist of two people. Partially, the place of the third crew member was taken by the installation of autonomous support for the life of light space suits, in which a significant volume was occupied by a cryogenic tank with an air supply.

The funeral of astronauts. From the blog, 1971

The crash of the spacecraft "Soyuz-11"

On June 30, 1971, the Soyuz-11 descent vehicle depressurized in the upper atmosphere. All crew members - Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsaev - died.

On April 19, 1971, the world's first long-term orbital station Salyut-1 was launched into space in the USSR. The history of this station is full of drama. It began with the fact that when it was put into orbit, the compartment with scientific equipment, where there was a solar telescope and other astrophysical instruments, did not open. The compartment remained locked.

Next, it was necessary to work out the technique of docking the station and the Soyuz transport spacecraft. The first such flight took place on April 23, 1971. V. Shatalov, A. Eliseev and N. Rukavishnikov moored to the station on the Soyuz-10 spacecraft, but after five and a half hours of the joint flight, the vehicles had to be separated: due to malfunctions in the docking port, the cosmonauts failed to board the Salyut they returned to earth.

It was the turn of the next crew - A. Leonov, V. Kubasov and P. Kolodin. G. Dobrovolsky, V. Volkov and V. Patsaev became their understudies. In May 1971, the training of crews for the flight - its duration should exceed the famous, 18-day, A. Nikolaev and V. Sevastyanov - came to an end. Everything went well: the cosmonauts went to Baikonur, "settled in" the transport ship and the real ship.

Three days before the start, the crews had to undergo a pre-flight medical examination. And here the unexpected happened: doctors discovered a small inflammatory focus in Kubasov's lungs. The cosmonaut felt fine, did not complain, so the verdict of the doctors met with hostility - after all, he was in the main crew and already “felt” the launch, and now he, in fact, was removed from the flight.

The chairman of the State Commission, Kerim Kerimov, listened to the report of the doctors, to put it mildly, without enthusiasm: the removal of one cosmonaut from the flight meant, according to unwritten rules, the replacement of the entire crew, and this, in turn, entailed a whole range of work on the ship, already prepared for the main crew. A. Leonov was also annoyed; he demanded that flight engineer Volkov fly instead of flight engineer Kubasov. However, the chief designer Mishin did not agree with him. In the end, they decided that understudies would fly - Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsaev.

According to Vera Alexandrovna Patsaeva, her husband was very happy when he learned that he was flying to the station. “He really wanted to go to space. But their crew was the main one for the second flight to the Salyut station, and on this basis there were disagreements with Volkov. After all, Vladislav already had a flight behind him, wrote a book about him and did not want to rush.

About six months earlier, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsaev, along with their wives and children, rested together in a boarding house on Istra. Vera Alexandrovna recalls how once they sat up until late in the evening, opened up, and Vladislav admitted: "I'm glad I won't fly to the first station." - "Why?" Patsaeva was surprised. “I was predicted that I would die,” he replied.

On June 5, 1971, on the eve of the flight, at the traditional meeting with the launch team of the cosmodrome (many traditions, like this one, were laid down by S.P. Korolev from the first space flights), the spacecraft commander Dobrovolsky spoke. The crew of A. Leonov took the position of understudies.

Let's pay tribute to the Baikonur team: three days before the start, they managed to carry out the entire range of work for the new crew.

June 6: a brief report from the commander - and now the astronauts appeared on the upper platform of the maintenance farms. The last farewell wave of hands, the last glances at the Earth before the start. Soyuz-11 launched exactly at the appointed time - at 7.55.

A day later, Dobrovolsky, Volkov and Patsaev, already on the Salyut, began to implement the program. But it was captivating: for the first time, the crew created, in fact, an orbital long-term laboratory. Moreover, the main task - automatic rendezvous with the Salyut-1 station, docking and transfer of the crew to the orbital station - has already been completed.

The crew is not destined to tell about their flight. But the surviving documents make it possible to recreate day by day the events and the very atmosphere of the stellar flight. Behind the usual “Everything is fine”, “There is full order on board”, which invariably sounded in the radio and television reports from orbit, was exhausting work, sometimes on the verge of the possible.

The astronauts carried out a rich program of scientific, military, medical and technical experiments. At the same time, as they wrote later, something did not work out in the crew. In Dobrovolsky's notebook, in particular, they found an entry: "If this is compatibility, then what is incompatibility?" True, the commander made it during the first and most difficult week of his stay at the station: extreme conditions of weightlessness, annoying extraneous odors on board the still uninhabited station, a program scheduled literally to the minute. The astronauts worked around the clock, "in shifts." And the overstrain of those days, apparently, had an effect.

There were no incidents either. There was a fire at the orbital station - power cables caught fire, acrid smoke poured out. The astronauts barely managed to get into the descent vehicle and were already preparing for an emergency evacuation.

“Dobrovolsky had a wonderful character: he knew how to translate everything into a joke,” says V. Patsaeva. - Probably, not everyone knows that an emergency happened on board the Salyut station - the wiring caught fire. Then Volkov sent a message to Earth: they have a fire, and they will descend. George did not argue, although together with Vitya he continued to look for the cause of the fire. Eventually they found her and removed her. The flight continued.

By the end of June 29, everything is ready to return to Earth; the crew was congratulated on the successful completion of the program. After control checks of the sealing of the descent vehicle before undocking, Soyuz-11 received the go-ahead to “set off” from the station. At 21.28 Moscow time, the Soyuz undocked from the Salyut.

Fragments of some communication sessions of the earth (call sign "Dawn") with the crew (call sign "Yantar") were first published on the pages of the Government Bulletin:

"30 June. "Dawn": "Yantar" - to everyone; from undocking to landing, be sure to report continuously on how you feel and the results of your observations. Continuously reporting. Got it?

Yantar-2 (V. Volkov): Got it, got it... I see rain, I see rain! Great saw. Shines.

"Dawn": Write down the time - 01.47.27.

"Yantar-2": While the Earth is not visible, it is not visible yet.

Zarya: How is orientation going?

"Yantar-2": We saw the Earth, we saw it!

Zarya: Okay, take your time.

"Yantar-2": "Dawn", I'm "Yantar-2". Orientation started. To the right is rain.

"Yantar-2": Great flies, beautiful!

"Yantar-3" (V. Patsaev): "Dawn", I am the third. I can see the horizon at the bottom of the porthole.

"Dawn": "Amber", once again I remind you of the orientation - zero - one hundred and eighty degrees.

"Yantar-2": Zero - one hundred and eighty degrees.

"Dawn": Correctly understood.

"Yantar-2": The banner "Descent" is on.

Zarya: Let it burn. Everything is great. Burns correctly. The connection ends. Happily!"

The flight was still going on. On the thirtieth of June, at 1.35, after the orientation of the Soyuz, the braking propulsion system was turned on. Having worked out the estimated time and losing speed, the ship began to deorbit. After aerodynamic deceleration in the atmosphere, the parachute opened normally, the soft landing engines fired, the descent vehicle landed smoothly in the steppes of Central Kazakhstan, west of Mount Munly.

Instruments of the measuring complex dispassionately recorded the duration of the expedition - 23 days, 18 hours, 21 minutes, 43 seconds. New world record.

Doctor Anatoly Lebedev, who then worked at the Cosmonaut Training Center, says:

“On June 30, at 1.35, Soyuz-11 turned on the braking propulsion system and began its descent to the Earth. In our helicopter, we carefully listened to the radio communications of other search groups - who will see the ship first?

Finally laconic: “I see! Accompany!" - and an explosion of voices on the air. All voices except... Yes, for sure: one thing was surprising - none of the crews of the search service could contact the astronauts. Even then we thought: probably, the sling antenna does not work, and therefore it is impossible to establish communication with the Soyuz crew.

Finally, we, the doctors, through the windows of the helicopter saw the white-orange dome of the ship's parachute, a little silvery from the rising sun. We flew straight to the landing site.

Silently (for us!) the engines of the soft landing of the Soyuz whipped up a cloud of dust, the silk "foam" of the parachute system smoothly drooped. We sat down after the ship, about fifty to a hundred meters away. How does it happen in such cases? You open the hatch of the descent vehicle, from there - the voices of the crew. And then - the crunch of scale, the sound of metal, the chirp of helicopters and ... silence from the ship.

I happened to be the first to remove its commander, Georgy Dobrovolsky, from the ship. I knew he was sitting in the middle chair. Frankly, I didn’t recognize him: the astronauts grew beards during the flight (they had difficulty shaving), and the unusual conditions of the descent also, apparently, affected their appearance. Following Dobrovolsky, we took out Patsaev and Volkov.

Volkov was generally very handsome, his friends in Star City called him Marcello, in honor of Mastroianni, then, and even now, a film idol. Later, with some almost mystical feeling, I found his note in my home “archive” - we played before the flight, we didn’t finish the game, and he wrote on a piece of paper: “I’ll be back - I’ll finish the game.” "I'll be back" ... But all this after.

In the first moments, nothing is clear; A quick inspection also did not allow us to immediately draw a conclusion about the state of the crew: what happened during the seconds of radio silence while the descent vehicle's ball was piercing the atmosphere?! All astronauts have almost normal body temperature.

And, to be honest, it’s not that it’s a misunderstanding - the thought of the tragedy simply didn’t come close to anyone in those seconds. Our entire medical team deployed instantly. The presence of an experienced resuscitator from the Sklifosovsky Institute immediately determined the nature and means of assistance. Six doctors started artificial respiration, chest compressions.

One more minute… General Goreglyad, the head of the search and rescue group, asked me, I remember briefly: “Well?!”

However, there is no need to decipher: he, Goreglyad, needs to report something to the chairman of the State Commission ... This has never happened before: the ship is on Earth, all communication lines work right up to the Kremlin, but we are silent.

We continued to work with everything we could.

One after another, helicopters landed near the ship, people froze in agonizing expectation of news from working doctors. There was an amazing silence. Impossible, absolutely impossible for such a moment in a normal landing! ..

And again, General Goreglyad more strictly and loudly demanded from the doctors a conclusion on the condition of the crew: “This is necessary for a report to the government!”

Like it needs to be repeated!

Even now I cannot forget the moment when a phrase was uttered by my lips that frightened me myself: “Tell me that the crew ... that the crew landed without signs of life!” It sounded like a sentence to my dear astronaut friends! Who knew that this tragic formula would later be included in TASS reports. But an hour and a half ago we heard the radio communications of the crew; then everything went fine until the landing itself!

What happened? Even long before the launch, medical experts assumed that after a flight of such a duration, there could be “difficulties in transferring overloads” during the descent. But not such a final flight. All medical workers continued to perform their duties until the appearance of absolute signs of the death of the astronauts ... "

A few days later, the results of deciphering the black box records became known. An analysis of the records of the autonomous recorder of the onboard measurement system showed that from the moment the amenity compartment was separated - at an altitude of more than 150 kilometers - the pressure in the descent vehicle began to drop and after 30-40 seconds it became practically zero. 42 seconds after the depressurization, the astronauts' hearts stopped.

A word to cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: “There was a mistake in the design. There was a depressurization of the cabin during the firing of the orbital compartment. When assembling ball valves, instead of using 90 kg, the installers screwed them in with a force of 60-65 kg. When firing off the orbital compartment, a large overload occurred, which forced these valves to work, and they crumbled. A hole with a diameter of 20 mm was found. After 22 seconds, the astronauts lost consciousness.

A valve that equalizes the pressure in the cabin with respect to the external atmosphere is provided in case the ship makes a water landing or lands hatch down. The supply of life support system resources is limited, and so that the astronauts do not experience a lack of oxygen, the valve "connected" the ship to the atmosphere. It was supposed to work during landing in the normal mode only at an altitude of 4 km, but it worked in a vacuum.

Why did the valve open? After long tests and simulations of various situations, the commission put forward a version of spontaneous discovery, which became the only one. On this investigation, in fact, ended.

The pressure in the astronauts' cabin dropped to almost zero in seconds. After the tragedy, someone from the authorities expressed the idea: they say, the hole formed in the shell of the descent vehicle could be closed ... with a finger. But doing this is not as easy as it seems. All three were in chairs, fastened with seat belts, as it should be according to the instructions during landing. Together with Rukavishnikov, Leonov participated in a simulated landing. All conditions are simulated in the pressure chamber. It turned out that it would take the cosmonauts more than thirty seconds to unfasten their belts and close a hole the size of a Soviet-era five-kopeck coin. They lost consciousness much earlier and could do nothing. Dobrovolsky, apparently, was trying to do something - he managed to pull off his seat belts; Alas, there wasn't enough time.

The crew descended to the ground without spacesuits. This decision was made personally by Korolev even before the launch of Voskhod. And it is impossible to accommodate three people in space suits in the Soyuz. However, problems with tightness have not previously arisen in any of the flights of Vostok, Voskhod, unmanned and manned Soyuz.

After the death of Dobrovolsky, Volkov and Patsaev, the cosmonauts began to fly in special suits. Recommendations were urgently developed to guarantee the safety of people in the event of depressurization of the descent vehicle.

Georgy Timofeevich Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Nikolaevich Volkov and Viktor Ivanovich Patsaev entered the history of cosmonautics as the first crew of the first Salyut orbital station.

Heroes-cosmonauts were buried at the Kremlin wall.

From the book 100 great plane crashes author Muromov Igor

The Challenger spacecraft disaster On January 28, 1986, the US spacecraft Challenger exploded at 74 seconds after launch. 7 astronauts were killed. The Space Shuttle program became the most difficult for NASA. Already the first start of "Colombia" was postponed

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Onboard medical equipment of a spacecraft

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Section one. Arrangement of a ship and equipment of the upper deck Chapter 1. Arrangement of a surface ship and a submarine 1.1. The device of a surface ship A warship is a complex self-propelled engineering structure, bearing the naval ensign assigned to it.

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Section three. Maintenance of the ship Chapter 8. Ship work 8.1. Inspections of the ship's hull All parts of the ship's hull and ship premises are assigned to the management of certain persons according to the schedule for the departments, who are required to know their details in detail.

From the book Great Soviet Encyclopedia (AB) of the author TSB

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TSB

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Spacecraft maneuver A spacecraft maneuver is an intentional change in the orbit of a spacecraft that causes it to change from one (initial) orbit to another (final), such as

From the ship to the ball From the novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" (1823-1831) by A. S. Pushkin (1799-1837) (ch. 8, stanza 13): And he was tired of traveling, Like everything in the world, tired, He returned and got, like Chatsky, from the ship to

From the book Dictionary of Modern Quotes author Dushenko Konstantin Vasilievich

ARMSTRONG Neil (Armstrong, Neil Alden, b. 1930), commander of the American spacecraft "Apollo 11" 87 This is a small step of one person, but a giant step of mankind. The words that Armstrong uttered when he stepped on the surface of the moon on July 21, 1969

On June 30, 1971, the first crew of the Salyut orbital space station in the history of astronautics, consisting of Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsaev, died while returning to Earth. This tragic incident was the largest in the history of Russian cosmonautics - the entire crew died ...

The Soviet and American space programs operated in a highly competitive environment. Each of the parties sought to get ahead of the competitor at all costs and become the first. At first, the palm belonged to the USSR: the first launch of an artificial satellite of the Earth, the first launch of a man into space, the first man's spacewalk, the first flight of a woman astronaut remained with the Soviet Union.

The Americans focused on the moon race and won. Although the USSR had a theoretical opportunity to be the first to be in time, the program was too unreliable and the probability of a catastrophe was too high, so the Soviet leadership did not dare to risk the lives of their astronauts. The Soviet lunar detachment of cosmonauts was transferred to training under the Docking program for the first flight to the orbital station.

Having safely landed on the Moon, the Americans proved to themselves that they can also do something, after which they became overly carried away by the Earth's satellite. The USSR at that time was already developing a project for a manned orbital station and won another victory in this area by launching its orbital station two years earlier than the United States did.

The Salyut station was planned to be launched into orbit by the beginning of the 24th Congress of the CPSU, but it was a little late. The station was put into orbit only on April 19, 1971, ten days after the closing of the congress.

"Soyuz-10"

Almost immediately, the first crew was sent to the orbital station. On April 24, five days after the station entered orbit, the Soyuz-10 spacecraft launched from Baikonur. On board were the ship's commander Vladimir Shatalov, flight engineer Alexei Eliseev and test engineer Nikolai Rukavishnikov.

It was a very experienced crew. Shatalov and Eliseev have already made two flights on the Soyuz spacecraft, only Rukavishnikov was a newcomer to space. It was planned that Soyuz-10 would successfully dock with the orbital station, after which the astronauts would stay on it for three weeks.

But things didn't go as planned. The ship safely reached the station and began docking, but then failures began. The docking port pin interlocked with the station, but the automation failed and the corrective motors began to work, causing the Soyuz to sway and the docking port to break.

Docking was out of the question. Moreover, the entire program of the Salyut station was in jeopardy, since the astronauts did not know how to get rid of the docking pin. It could have been "shooted off", but this would have made it impossible for any other ship to dock with the Salyut and meant the collapse of the entire program.

The design engineers who were on Earth got involved in the matter, who advised installing a jumper and using it to open the lock and remove the Soyuz pin. After several hours, this was finally done - and the astronauts went home.

Crew change

Preparations for the Soyuz-11 flight began. This crew was slightly less experienced than the previous one. None of the astronauts has been in space more than once. But the crew commander was Alexei Leonov - the first person to make a spacewalk. In addition to him, the crew included flight engineer Valery Kubasov and engineer Pyotr Kolodin.

For several months they trained in docking both in manual and automatic modes, because it was impossible for the second time in a row to lose face and return from flight without docking.

In early June, the departure date was determined. At a meeting of the Politburo, the date was approved, as was the composition of the crew, which everyone unequivocally certified as the most skillful.

But the unthinkable happened. Two days before the launch from Baikonur, sensational news came: during a standard pre-flight medical examination, doctors took an X-ray of Kubasov and found a slight blackout in one of his lungs.

Everything pointed to an acute tuberculosis process. True, it remained unclear how it could be viewed, because such a process does not develop in one day, and the astronauts underwent thorough and regular medical examinations. One way or another, it was impossible for Kubasov to fly into space.

But the State Commission and the Politburo have already approved the composition of the crew. What to do? Indeed, in the Soviet program, cosmonauts prepared for flights in triplets, and if one dropped out, it was necessary to change the entire trio, since it was believed that the triplets had already worked together, and replacing one crew member would lead to a violation of consistency.

But, on the other hand, no one before in the history of astronautics has changed the crew less than two days before departure. How to choose the right solution in such a situation? There was a heated argument between the curators of the space program.

Nikolai Kamanin, assistant commander-in-chief of the Air Force for space, insisted that Leonov's crew was experienced, and if Volkov, who also had experience in space flights, was replaced by the retired Kubasov, then there would be nothing terrible and the coordination of actions would not be disturbed.

However, the designer Mishin, one of the developers of Salyut and Soyuz, advocated a complete change of the troika. He believed that the backup team would be much better prepared and worked together than the main one, but subjected to a change in composition on the eve of the flight. In the end, Mishin's point of view won out.

Leonov's crew was removed, replaced by a backup crew, consisting of commander Georgy Dobrovolsky, flight engineer Vladislav Volkov and research engineer Viktor Patsaev. None of them had been in space, with the exception of Volkov, who had already flown on one of the Soyuz.

Leonov's crew took the suspension from the flight very painfully. Boris Chertok later recalled the words of designer Mishin: “Oh, what a difficult conversation I had with Leonov and Kolodin!” he told us. Volkov's space. Kolodin said that he felt until the last day that he would not be allowed into space under any pretext. Kolodin says: “I am their white crow. They are all pilots, and I am a rocket man."

None of the angry cosmonauts could even imagine that an erroneous x-ray (Kubasov did not have any tuberculosis and later he successfully flew into space) saved their lives. But then the situation escalated to the limit.

Chertok personally observed this picture: “At the State Commission, I ended up next to Kolodin. He sat with his head low, nervously clenching his fists and unclenching his fingers, his jaws played on his face. Not only he was nervous. Both crews felt unwell. The first was shocked by the removal from flight, the second - a sudden change in fate.

After the flight, the second crew had to climb the marble stairs of the Kremlin Palace to the fanfare, Glinka's music, and receive the stars of heroes. But there was no joy on their faces.

Flight

The Soyuz-11 took off from Baikonur on June 6, 1971. The cosmonauts were worried not only because two of them had not been in space before, but also because of the lush wires: the day before departure, the mourners staged a real rally at which they made speeches.

Nevertheless, the launch of the ship took place in the normal mode and without any failures. The astronauts successfully and without problems docked with the orbital station. It was an exciting moment, because they were to become the first earthlings aboard the space station.

The cosmonauts settled safely on the orbital station, which, although small, seemed huge to them after the incredibly cramped Soyuz. The first week they got used to the new environment. Among other things, the astronauts on the Salyut had a television connection with the Earth.

On June 16, an emergency occurred at the station. The astronauts felt a strong smell of burning. Volkov contacted Earth and reported the fire. The issue of urgent evacuation from the station was being decided, but Dobrovolsky decided not to rush and turn off some devices, after which the smell of burning disappeared.

In total, the astronauts spent 23 days in orbit. They had a fairly rich program of research and experimentation. In addition, they had to mothball the station for the next crews.

Catastrophe

In general, the flight went well - no one expected any emergency. The crew got in touch and carried out orientation. As it turned out, this was the last communication session with the crew.

As expected, at 1:35 a.m. the braking propulsion system was activated. At 01:47, the descent vehicle separated from the instrument and utility compartments. At 01:49 the crew was supposed to get in touch and report on the successful separation of the descent vehicle.

The descent vehicle did not have a telemetry system, and no one on Earth knew what was happening to the astronauts. It was planned that immediately after the separation, Dobrovolsky would get in touch. The silence on the radio very surprised the experts, because the crew was very talkative and sometimes spoke to the Earth much more than the situation required.

The return to Earth took place as planned, without excesses, so at first there was no reason to believe that something had happened to the crew. The most likely version was a malfunction of the radio equipment.

At 01:54, air defense systems spotted the descent vehicle. At an altitude of 7 thousand meters, the main parachute of the descent vehicle opened, which was equipped with an antenna. The astronauts were required to contact either HF or VHF channels and report on the situation. But they were silent, not answering requests from the Earth. This was already alarming, none of the successfully returned Soyuz had communication problems at this stage.

At about 2:05 am, the helicopters meeting the descent vehicle discovered it and reported it to the Mission Control Center. Ten minutes later, the craft landed safely. Externally, the device did not have any damage, but the crew still did not get in touch and showed no signs of life. It was already clear that some kind of emergency had occurred, but there was still hope that the astronauts might have lost consciousness, but still alive.

Immediately after landing, a meeting helicopter landed next to the device, and two minutes later the rescuers were already opening the hatch of the device. Chertok recalled: “The descent vehicle was lying on its side. Outwardly, there was no damage.

They knocked on the wall, no one answered. The hatch was quickly opened. All three sit in armchairs in calm poses. There are blue spots on the faces. Bleeding from nose and ears. Pulled them out of SA. Dobrovolsky was still warm. Doctors continue artificial respiration."

Attempts by doctors to resuscitate the crew by artificial respiration and heart massage were unsuccessful. An autopsy revealed that the crew died from decompression sickness caused by a sudden drop in pressure in the descent module.

Investigation

The circumstances of the death clearly indicated the depressurization of the ship. The very next day, studies of the descent vehicle began, but all attempts to detect a leak failed.

Kamanin recalled: “They closed the hatch and all other regular openings in the ship’s hull, created a pressure in the cabin that exceeded atmospheric pressure by 100 millimeters, and ... did not find the slightest sign of leakage. They increased the excess pressure to 150, and then to 200 millimeters. Having withstood ship under such pressure for an hour and a half, finally convinced of the complete sealing of the cabin.

But, if the apparatus was completely sealed, then how could depressurization occur? There was only one option left. The leak may have come from one of the vent valves. But this valve opened only after the parachute opened to equalize the pressure, how could it open when the descent vehicle separated?

The only theoretical option: the shock wave and the explosions of the squibs during the separation of the descent vehicle forced the squib to open the valve prematurely. But the Soyuz never had such problems (and indeed there was not a single case of depressurization either on manned or unmanned spacecraft).

Moreover, after the disaster, experiments were repeatedly carried out simulating this situation, but there was never an abnormal opening of the valve due to a shock wave or undermining squibs. No experiment has reproduced this situation.

But, since there were no other explanations, it was this version that was adopted as the official one. It was stipulated that this event belongs to the category of extremely unlikely, since it could not be reproduced under experimental conditions.

The commission was able to approximately reconstruct the events that took place inside the descent vehicle. After the regular compartment of the apparatus, the astronauts discovered a depressurization, as the pressure dropped rapidly.

They had less than a minute to find and eliminate her. The crew commander Dobrovolsky checks the hatch, but it is airtight. Trying to detect a leak by sound, astronauts turn off radio transmitters and equipment. Most likely, they managed to detect a leak, but no longer had the strength to close the valve.

The pressure drop was too strong, and within a minute the astronauts lost consciousness, and after about two minutes they were dead. Everything would be different if the crew had a spacesuit. But the Soviet cosmonauts returned in the descent vehicle without them. Both Korolev and Mishin opposed this.

The suits were very bulky, as were the life-support equipment they needed, and the ships were already too cramped. Therefore, I had to choose: either an additional crew member, or spacesuits, or a radical reorganization of the ship and the descent vehicle.

Results

The dead cosmonauts were buried in the Kremlin wall. At that time, it was the largest catastrophe in space in terms of the number of victims. For the first time, an entire crew was killed. The tragedy of Soyuz-11 led to the fact that flights under this program were frozen for more than two years.

During this time, the program itself was radically revised. Since then, astronauts have been required to return back in protective space suits. In order to get more space in the descent vehicle, it was decided to abandon the third crew member. The layout of the controls was changed so that the astronaut, without getting up, could reach all the most important buttons and levers.

After the introduction of improvements, the Soyuz program has established itself as one of the most reliable and is still operating successfully.

On June 6, 1971, we witnessed the eighteenth launch of the Soyuz-11 manned spacecraft. It happened at 07:55 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Before the crew of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft, consisting of commander G. T. Dobrovolsky, flight engineer V. N. Volkov and test engineer V. I. Patsaev, the State Commission set a large and responsible task - to dock with the Salyut orbital scientific station , go to its premises and carry out the planned scientific and technical research and experiments for many days.

Scientists, engineers, technicians, working day and night, worked near these unique devices, preparing them to perform important work in space orbits.

For the first time in the history of active human space exploration, our scientists managed to solve a complex scientific and technical problem - to create an orbital manned station. This took years of hard, persistent work of many teams. We know that in January 1969, as a result of the docking of two manned multi-seat spacecraft Soyuz-4 and Soyuz-5, an experimental space station was created for the first time in the world.

The successful space flight of Soyuz-4 and Soyuz-5 made it possible to solve many scientific and technical problems of great practical importance for the creation of future orbital stations.

We know that many factors act on the human body in space flight: overloads, vibrations, noises and, of course, weightlessness.

Weightlessness is a big problem for scientists in many countries of the world. We have already said that the astronauts who flew into space and endured this unusual state felt differently. Some felt a pleasant lightness, others experienced the illusion of falling, turning upside down, loss of orientation in space, for some, weightlessness caused severe bouts of "seasickness". Therefore, it is no coincidence that a number of experiments were carried out in space in the Soviet Union and the United States, associated with a long stay of man and animals in a state of weightlessness.

For 14 days of flight on the Gemini-7 spacecraft in 1965, the American cosmonauts Borman and Lovell lost 4.3 and 2.7 kilograms in weight, respectively, as a result of some dehydration of the body. The cosmonauts experienced irritation of the mucous membrane of the nose and eyes and a short-term decrease in tone, one of them (Bormann) slept restlessly.

In 1966, in the Soviet Union, the Kosmos-110 satellite was launched into the orbit of an artificial satellite of the Earth with experimental animals, which, 22 days later, after completing the program, landed on the 330th orbit. It was found that at the beginning of the flight, the animals showed a decrease in the volume of muscle mass, impaired coordination of movements, increased heart rate, etc. The scientists also determined that at the beginning of the flight there was an increased excretion of calcium salts from the body, the animals lost weight due to a decrease in muscle mass and some dehydration. It is known that when a person loses 20% of salt, convulsions occur, and if the human body loses 15% of water, it can die.

Long before man's flight into space, different opinions were expressed about the effect of weightlessness on the state of the human body and on its mental activity. In the first flights, the cosmonauts confirmed that this phenomenon really brought a lot of unpleasant sensations to some of them.

If the world's first cosmonaut Yu. A. Gagarin, who was in weightlessness for about one hour, performed his functions without much difficulty, then G. S. Titov endured this state, as we have already said, with some unpleasant sensations (dizziness, illusions " swimming" with a sharp turn of the head, loss of appetite, etc.). In subsequent flights, the cosmonauts each endured the state of weightlessness in a different way. But basically all the flying astronauts endured it without any noticeable deterioration in well-being. True, A. G. Nikolaev and V. I. Sevastyanov, after completing an 18-day flight on the Soyuz-9 spacecraft, slowly adapted to earthly conditions. It took them a certain time to transition to the normal conditions of earthly life. For several days, the body of these cosmonauts adapted to the conditions of weightlessness, after which they were able to perform any operations as easily as on Earth.

From this we can conclude that the process of adaptation to weightlessness during the period of flight in space, as well as the process of readaptation on Earth, in cosmonauts took place gradually, in several stages, depending on the individual characteristics of the organism.

As a result of space flights, Soviet and American cosmonauts have now accumulated a large amount of scientific material on the effect of weightlessness on the psychophysiological functions of a person. However, it is too early to say that the problem has been solved.

But let us return to the flight of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft. On June 7, the cosmonauts had to carry out the most important stage of the flight - docking. In the morning, the crew turned on a special program on the Soyuz-11 control panel, with the help of which they were to conduct a rendezvous with the Salyut station. At 7 hours 27 minutes 47 seconds, when the distance between the ship and the station was 6 kilometers, the engine turned on for 20 seconds, and the vehicles automatically approached each other up to 100 meters. Further, all the control of rendezvous and berthing was carried out by the crew manually. At 0858 hours, the docking of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft with the Salyut station was completed. The crew carefully checked the tightness of the connection between the ship and the station. After that, the pressure in their compartments was equalized. After making sure that everything was in order, test engineer Viktor Patsaev was the first to board the Salyut, followed by the rest of the crew. It happened on June 7 at 10:45.

For the first time, a crew was delivered aboard a scientific orbital station by a transport ship. Since that time, the first manned orbital scientific station began to operate in space. The station commander, Georgy Dobrovolsky, reported to Earth about the start of the work of the crew aboard the Salyut.

On the first day of their stay at the station, the crew inspected all its premises and carried out a re-preservation, and then a check of the scientific equipment. A manned scientific orbital station is a whole scientific laboratory. Its length is about 20 meters. The volume of all premises is more than 100 cubic meters. Weight together with the Soyuz-11 spacecraft is about 25 tons. Structurally, the station is designed so that the crew can carry out scientific, technical and biomedical research and experiments for a long time. To correct the orbit, there are rocket propulsion systems on board.

At 1102 hours on June 8, the crew carried out the first correction, as a result of which the altitude increased by 22 kilometers at the apogee and by 29 kilometers at the perigee. The next day, the cosmonauts adjusted the onboard scientific equipment and mothballed some systems on the Soyuz-11 spacecraft. The VSHK (wide-angle cosmonaut's sight), which is designed for orientation to the Sun and planets, was successfully tested. In addition, the crew took measurements of the radiation level on board the station. Each of the cosmonauts put on a special suit "Penguin", which creates a certain load on the musculoskeletal organs of a person in a state of weightlessness.

So the Salyut scientific orbital station continued its flight in space, turn after turn. Communication between the station and the Mission Control Center was stable. The astronauts felt good. On June 10, the crew conducted biomedical studies of the state of the cardiovascular system under weightless conditions. With the help of a special multichannel amplifying-converting device, functional samples were taken from the cosmonauts to determine the density of bone tissues and blood composition.

The station's onboard systems and scientific equipment worked normally. According to the established schedule, the cosmonauts regularly made television reports from the station. Flight engineer Vladislav Volkov and test engineer Viktor Patsaev repeatedly carried out navigational measurements, the results of which were used to determine the parameters of the station's orbit using an onboard digital computer.

At 07:55 on June 24, cosmonauts G. T. Dobrovolsky, V. N. Volkov, and V. I. Patsaev achieved the results in terms of the duration and range of space flight that were established in 18 days of flight by A. G. Nikolaev and V. I. Sevastyanov on the Soyuz-9 spacecraft.

Exactly two days later, that is, on June 26, when 20 days of flight expired, the crew of the manned orbital scientific station became the owner of absolute world record achievements in terms of duration and range of space flight. By this time Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsaev had by this time blocked the world achievements previously established by their friends Andrian Nikolaev and Vitaly Sevastyanov in the space flight June 1-19, 1970 on the Soyuz-9 spacecraft. The cosmonauts on the Soyuz-11 spacecraft and the Salyut station made a total of about 340 orbits around our planet, spent more than 480 hours in space and covered a distance of 13,440,000 kilometers. Less than four days remained before the end of the flight program. On June 27 and 28, the cosmonauts once again checked all the on-board systems of the station and the Soyuz-11 spacecraft and performed a number of biomedical experiments. According to the report of the cosmonauts, all onboard systems of the spacecraft and the station worked normally.

June 29, 1971 - the last day of the flight. On board the orbital scientific station from the Earth received an instruction to complete the flight and prepare for landing. The cosmonauts, having made sure that all the systems of the spacecraft and the station were working properly, prepared for landing. G. T. Dobrovolsky, V. N. Volkov, and V. I. Patsaev transferred the logbooks and other scientific research materials from the Salyut station to the Soyuz-11 spacecraft. The astronauts took their jobs, strapped themselves in, and then checked the operation of all onboard systems of the spacecraft. In the Soyuz-11 compartments, the pressure and temperature were normal. All equipment worked fine. Radio communication with the Earth was stable.

At 21:28, the Soyuz-11 was successfully undocked from the Salyut orbital station, and the crew reported back to Earth. The Soyuz-11 spacecraft began its independent flight without the Salyut station. All systems of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft functioned normally. The Soyuz-11 flight in outer space continued for about 4 hours until the automatic orientation system was turned on. At about 1 hour 10 minutes on June 30, 1971, the ship's attitude control system was turned on, and 25 minutes later, the braking propulsion system, which had worked for the estimated time, was turned on. The moment came for the descent vehicle to separate from the instrument and orbital compartments. Since that time, communication with the crew of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft has ceased. The descent vehicle, in which the cosmonauts Dobrovolsky, Volkov and Patsaev were, entered the dense layers of the atmosphere. At 02:02, the parachute system was put into action. At an altitude of 9000 meters, the parachute opened.

There is no communication with the astronauts. A group of search and rendezvous helicopters approached the ship's landing site. Planes circled in the air. From the Mi-6 helicopter in which we were, it was clearly visible how smoothly, slowly swaying under the canopy of a large parachute, the cabin of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft was descending. At the very ground, powder engines of soft landing turned on. The Soyuz-11 cabin hung for a moment and slowly sank to the ground.

I write down: “At 2 hours 15 minutes Moscow time, the Soyuz-11 descent vehicle landed with cosmonauts G. T. Dobrovolsky, V. N. Volkov and V. I. Patsaev.” We run to the landing site. The technical support group opens the hatch. We take out Georgy Timofeevich Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Nikolaevich Volkov and Viktor Ivanovich Patsaev from the cockpit of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft. Astronauts without signs of life. The doctors did everything they could, but it was too late.

According to the preliminary conclusion of the doctor Anatoly Alexandrovich Lebedev, it was established at the landing site that the crew died from a sharp drop in pressure in the cabin of the ship. As it turned out later, the Soyuz-11 crew died as a result of a violation of the ship's tightness. Pilot-cosmonauts of the USSR G. T. Dobrovolsky, V. N. Volkov and V. I. Patsaev fully completed the program of scientific research. They made a huge contribution to the development of orbital manned flights.

Entries made by cosmonauts in the logbooks, personal reports recorded on magnetic tape, a large number of film frames filmed in space were studied by scientists.

During the 24 days of the flight, the USSR pilot-cosmonauts G. T. Dobrovolsky, V. N. Volkov and V. I. Patsaev performed an extensive range of works of great scientific, technical and national economic practical importance. They carried out tests under the conditions of flight of the complex Salyut-Soyuz system, which are of promising importance for other ships and stations that, following the Soyuz-11, will enter the expanses of the Universe.