Soyuz 28 was a manned Soviet was launched March 2, 1978, and was the third mission to dock with Salyut 6. Vladimír Remek was also the first person who was launch into space who was not a citizen of the United Stage or the Soviet Union. It was the first mission in the Intercosmos program that have Eastern Bloc and other Communist countries access to space through manned and unmanned launches.
| 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 |
They docked with Salyut 6, which was already occupied by Georgi Grechko and Yuri Romanenko. All Intercosmos missions it was seven days and 21.5 hours plus minus one hour in length. This meant that no country could be offended by the fact that such and such country had a longer flight and possibly perceive that the Soviet Union liked that country more!
The mission was mostly for propaganda purposes. The four crew on Salyut 6 received messages from Leonid Brezhnev and Gustav Husak, 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. Husak 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.
The guest cosmonauts had usually received a minimum of training, compounded by the fact that often they did not speak Russian. As such 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 everytime he went to touch something, the Russian crewmembers would slap his hand and yell, "Don't touch that!"
The crew laned 135 km north of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan in the Soyuz 28 spacecraft.
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