US-Soviet docking cosmonaut dies, 79
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Soviet cosmonaut Valery Kubasov, who took part in the first docking of a US Apollo spacecraft with a Soviet Soyuz, has died aged 79, the Russian spacecraft corporation said yesterday.
Kubasov was one of two crew members of the Soyuz 19 spacecraft that docked with the US Apollo spacecraft on July 17, 1975, marking both a technical breakthrough and a rare relaxation in Cold War tensions.
He died suddenly on Wednesday after a short illness, the Russian space corporation RKK Energiya said.
The docking saw Soyuz commander Alexei Leonov shake hands with American astronaut Thomas Stafford, a gesture watched on television around the world.
Leonov said that when the US astronauts crossed into the hatch, they saw an inscription from Shakespeare: “Brave new world that has such people in it.”
The US and Soviet teams worked together for two days.
Four crew members including Kubasov, who was the flight engineer, met in Moscow in 2010 to mark the 35th anniversary of the docking.
Kubasov recalled that the US crew members connected the cosmonauts by radio to US President Gerald Ford, Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily reported.
The docking of the two craft paved the way for the International Space Station.
Kubasov was twice decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s top honor.
After training at Moscow’s aviation institute, he worked as an engineer involved in spaceship construction before becoming a cosmonaut in 1966.
On his first space flight in 1969, he was the first ever to experiment with welding in open space. The Soyuz mission was his second space flight.
His third and last space flight was a 1980 mission to a Soviet orbital space station, Salyut 6.
Kubasov was a “strong personality, a man out of the ordinary,” said the RKK Energiya statement.
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