BURAN-RELATED SOYUZ MISSIONS

Although seasoned test pilots, none of the LII Buran pilots had any spaceflight experience. Assuming Buran’s first manned mission would be flown by two LII pilots, both would be space rookies. This became problematic after events in October 1977, only a couple of months after the first LII pilots had been selected.

On 9 October 1977 cosmonauts Vladimir Kovalyonok and Valeriy Ryumin blasted off aboard the Soyuz-25 spacecraft to become the first crew to board the Salyut-6 space station. However, one day later, the cosmonauts, both first-time flyers, failed to dock their transport craft with the station and in the end were forced to abandon their attempts and return to Earth. Judging by what happened after the mission, the crew was at least partially blamed for the failure. Upon their return they were not awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as was customary with cosmonauts who had completed their first mission. Even the crews of Soyuz-15 and Soyuz-23, who had also been unsuccessful in docking their transport ships to the stations they were supposed to occupy, had been awarded the prestigious title.

Besides denying Kovalyonok and Ryumin their Hero of the Soviet Union Gold Star medals, it was decided that from that moment on every Soviet space crew had to include at least one crew member with at least one space mission under his belt. This decision must have been made almost immediately after the landing of Soyuz-25, since Soyuz-26 was launched only three months later, carrying a new crew in accor­dance with the new rule (the original crew consisted of rookies Yuriy Romanenko and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov, but Ivanchenkov was replaced by veteran cosmonaut Georgiy Grechko).

The 1977 decision also had implications for the all-LII crews assigned to the first manned Buran mission. In preparation for that flight, it was necessary to give at least one of the crew members in both the prime and the back-up crews spaceflight experience. Therefore, the Council of Chief Designers decided on 10 March 1982 that both the prime and back-up crew commanders would occupy the third seat of a Soyuz that was scheduled to fly in the Soyuz-Salyut program [48].

Not only would that give the pilots a taste of the zero-g environment, they would also fly several types of aircraft immediately after landing in order to determine to what extent their flying abilities would be affected by their stay in weightlessness (a
research program known as Nevesomost or “Weightlessness”). Similar experiments (under the name Tonkost or “Precision”) had already been conducted by Vladimir Dzhanibekov after Soyuz-39 (March 1981) and Soyuz T-6 (June 1982), and by Leonid Popov after Soyuz-40 (May 1981) and Soyuz T-7 (August 1982). Both flew non-Buran landing profiles on a Tu-134 aircraft [49]. However, the LII pilots would be faced with a much more grueling flight schedule after landing. An additional reason for including Buran pilots in Soyuz crews was probably to acquaint them with the spacecraft in preparation for a possible Soyuz rescue mission during the early Buran test flights.