The Soyuz mission of Anatoliy Levchenko

Having flown Soyuz T-12, Igor Volk now had the spaceflight experience necessary to command the first manned mission of Buran. Next in line for a Soyuz mission was Anatoliy Levchenko, scheduled to be Volk’s back-up for the Buran flight. Levchenko began intensive training for his mission in March 1987. Two months later he was joined by his crewmates Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov, who were slated to fly a
record-breaking one-year mission as the third Main Expedition (EO-3) aboard the new Mir space station. Levchenko would go up with Titov and Manarov on Soyuz TM-4 in December 1987 and after a short period of handover activities would land with the EO-2 crew aboard Soyuz TM-3.

Crewing for the mission was:

(Kaleri had replaced the original back-up flight engineer Sergey Yemelyanov, who was medically disqualified in May 1987 and would die of a heart attack in 1992 at the age of just 41.)

In keeping with the new policy of glasnost that was developing in the Soviet Union under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov, the names of the crew members were announced to the public prior to the mission, on 9 December. The press was also told that both Levchenko and Shchukin were test pilots, although no explanation was initially given for their assignment. In an interview two days before launch, the chairman of the State Commission Lieutenant-General Kerim Kerimov was asked to describe the role of the test pilots in the Soyuz passenger seat. Although he revealed that the inclusion of both Volk and Levchenko was at the request of MAP, he didn’t elaborate on the reasons to send them into space. All he said was that Levchenko’s flight would last a week and that he thought “that period presumably would be

Anatoliy Levchenko relaxes during his stay on the Mir station (B. Vis files).

sufficient for the comrades who were sending him there to establish his qualities as a test pilot working in space” [63].

However, in this new era of openness journalists no longer would accept such a non-answer. The next day Vladimir Shatalov, asked directly what the reason for Levchenko’s presence in the crew was, said that new systems were being developed, including reusable ones that would land like an airplane. Landing such spacecraft called for completely new techniques and it was necessary to investigate the tech­nology of piloting these spacecraft to a safe landing [64]. The Soviet Union had already officially acknowledged that it was working on a reusable spacecraft on the eve of the maiden launch of the Energiya rocket in May 1987.

The following day, 21 December 1987, Soyuz TM-4 lifted off from Baykonur and reached orbit without problems. After a two-day flight, the Soyuz docked with the Mir space station, where Titov, Manarov, and Levchenko were greeted by the resident crew of Yuriy Romanenko and Aleksandr Aleksandrov. That same day Radio Moscow finally confirmed what had been obvious all along, saying “Levchenko has been sent on this mission to try out in zero gravity his skills for the future piloting of a shuttle spacecraft’’ [65]. For the next seven days Romanenko and Aleksandrov handed over the complex to the new expedition crew. Besides this, a joint program was conducted, although few details were given other than that it consisted of “scientific, technical, medical and biological experiments” [66].

After the handover operations had been completed, Romanenko, Aleksandrov, and Levchenko said their goodbyes to Titov and Manarov on 29 December and landed aboard Soyuz TM-3 some 80 kilometers from Arkalyk in Kazakhstan. Levchenko’s flight had lasted 7 days 21 hours 58 minutes. It was reported that winds at the landing site were so strong that it was difficult to set up the tent for the first medical check-ups, forcing the crew to be directly evacuated to the nearby helicopter of the medical staff [67]. Anatoliy Levchenko, supported by two men, was brought to a separate helicopter and within half an hour after landing was on his way to the airport of Arkalyk. In a repeat of Volk’s experiment, he boarded a Tupolev Tu – 154LL, flew it to LII in Zhukovskiy near Moscow, and then returned to the Baykonur cosmodrome on a MiG-25, performing Buran-landing profiles to test his flying abilities after more than a week in zero gravity.