glenn@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Glenn Chapman) (06/16/88)
The Soyuz TM-5 flight is now at its mid point. The crew of Anatoly Solovyov,
Viktor Savinykh and Alexander Alexandrov, along with the long duration Mir crew
of Vladimir Titov and Musahi Manarov held a telanews conference on June 13th
with reporters on the ground. The current mission will leave the station on
June 17th, probably using the Soyuz TM-4 capsule (which was launched on Dec. 21,
1987) and leaving the fresh TM-5. The Russians prefer to keep Soyuz's to less
than 7 months in orbit time connected to their space stations. By the way this
current flight was moved up to June 7th from its original scheduled start of
June 21 to avoid the full moon. The Bulgarian cosmonaut is doing some
observations with the Kvant astrophyics instruments which would conflict with
the higher light level from the moon at the end of June (the moon was dark
on June 14th).
Some more information is available about the upcoming missions. The
August flight will have Col. Mohammad Dauran or Capt. Abdol Ahad as the
cosmonaut from Afghanistan. This mission was originally scheduled for next
year but moved up due to the current withdrawal of Soviet troops from that
country. The November French flight will see Alexander Volkov as the mission
commander (Soyuz T-14, 64 day mission in Sept 17, '85 to Salyut 7) with
Jean-Loup Cretein as the guest (the flight engineer has not been named as of
yet).
An interview with Volkov was recently published in the June Spaceflight
issue where he reveals that on the T-14 mission the flight was originally to
last until Mar 16, '86, long after Mir was launched (Feb 20, '86). Soyuz T-14
you may recall did a semi crew switchoff with Dzhanibekov from Soyuz T-13
coming down with Georgi Grechko (T-14 crew) while Viktor Savinykh (who is the
flight engineer on the current Soyuz TM-5 mission) stayed on board.
Savinykh was part of the original crew of Volkov and Valdimir Vasyutin
meant for a Salyut 7 mission in the summer of '85 when the station problems
required that a repair crew (Soyuz T-13) be sent up. Note that the Soyuz T-15
crew flew on Mar. 13, '86 to Mir. This suggests that original intention was
for the Soyuz T-14 crew to occupy Sayut 7 and not come down until the T-15
crew had docked with the new Mir station. This was prevented due to the
illness of Vasyutin, which forced them to come down on Nov 23. That suggests
two interesting things were in the Soviet plans at that time, though neither
was achieved. First they probably planed permanent manned habitation to
begin with Salyut 7 in June '85 and for Mir to be manned continuously from
its initial occupation (the Soyuz T-15 mission to Mir appeared to end suddenly,
probably due to the delays in the Kvant expansion module's launching). Secondly
if Savinykh had completed the original planed mission he would have been up
there for 284 days, exceeding the 237 day flight of the Soyuz T-10b crew
from '84. This would explain the long delay until last year in breaking
that previous record of time in orbit. Thus if their problems had not occurred
on Soyuz T-14 we might now be looking at 3 years of permanent Soviet space
manned presence, rather than 1.3 years, and more time in orbit records.
Obviously the Russians have not had things go according to their plans over
the past few years. Yet they have continued to build up a huge lead in manned
experience in space. Here we have NASA closing down the whole manned activity
for about 2.5 years with a problem on the shuttle. That is not the way to
show "leadership" in the space field.
Glenn Chapman
MIT Lincoln Lab