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Soyuz program
The Soyuz ("Union") programme is a human
spaceflight programme that was initiated by the Soviet Union in the
early 1960's. It was originally part of a Moon landing programme
intended to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon. Both the Soyuz
spacecraft and the Soyuz rocket are part of this programme, which
is now the responsibility of the Russian Federal Space Agency.
The launch vehicles used in the Soyuz expendable
launch system are manufactured at the Progress State Research and
Production Rocket Space Center (TsSKB-Progress) in Samara, Russia.
As well as being used in the Soyuz programme as the launcher for
the manned Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz launch vehicles are now also
used to launch unmanned Progress supply spacecraft to the
International Space Station and commercial launches marketed and
operated by TsSKB-Progress and the Starsem company. There were 11
Soyuz launches in 2001 and 9 in 2002. Currently Soyuz vehicles are
launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and the
Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwest Russia. Starting in 2010 Soyuz
launch vehicles will also be launched from the Guiana Space Centre
in French Guiana.
The basic Soyuz spacecraft design was the basis
for many projects, many of which never came to light. Its earliest
form was intended to travel to the moon without employing a huge
booster like the Saturn V or the Soviet N-1 by repeatedly docking
with upper stages that had been put in orbit using the same rocket
as the Soyuz. This and the initial civilian designs were done under
the Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who did not
live to see the craft take flight. Several military derivatives
actually took precedence in the Soviet design process, though they
never came to pass.
A Soyuz spacecraft consists of three parts (from front to
back):
a spheroid orbital module
a small aerodynamic reentry module
a cylindrical service module with solar panels attached
There are several variants of the Soyuz spacecraft,
including:
Soyuz A 7K-9K-11K circumlunar complex proposal(1963)
Soyuz 7K-OK (1967-1971)
Soyuz 7K-L1 Zond (1967-1970)
Soyuz 7K-L3 LOK
Soyuz 7K-OKS (1971)
Soyuz 7K-T or "ferry" (1973-1981)
Soyuz 7K-TM (1975-1976)
Military Soyuz (7K-P, 7K-PPK, R, 7K-VI Zvezda, and OIS)
Soyuz-T (1976-1986)
Soyuz-TM (1986-2003)
Soyuz-TMA (2003-.... )
Soyuz-TMAT (2010/.... )
Soyuz-ACTS (2012/....)
The Zond spacecraft was another derivative,
designed to take a crew traveling in a figure-eight orbit around
the Earth and the moon but never achieving the degree of safety or
political need to be used for such.
Finally, the Progress series of unmanned cargo
ships for the Salyut and Mir space laboratories used the automatic
navigation and docking mechanism (but not the re-entry capsule) of
Soyuz.
As of 2007, Soyuz derivatives provide Russia's
human spaceflight capability and are used to ferry personnel and
supplies to and from the International Space Station.
While not a direct derivative, the Chinese
Shenzhou spacecraft follows the basic template originally pioneered
by Soyuz.
Soyuz 11
Soyuz 11 was the first successful visit to the
world's first space station, Salyut 1. The mission ended in
disaster when the crew capsule depressurised during preparations
for re-entry, killing the three-man crew. This accident resulted in
the only human deaths to occur in space (as opposed to high
atmosphere). The crew members aboard Soyuz 11 were Vladislav
Volkov, Georgi Dobrovolski and Viktor Patsayev.
CrewPosition Cosmonaut
Commander Georgi Dobrovolski
First spaceflight
Flight Engineer Vladislav Volkov
Second spaceflight
Test Engineer Viktor Patsayev
First spaceflight
Backup crewPosition Cosmonaut
Commander Aleksei Gubarev
Flight Engineer Vitali Sevastyanov
Test Engineer Anatoli Voronov
Original crewPosition Cosmonaut
Commander Alexei Leonov
Flight Engineer Valeri Kubasov
Test Engineer Pyotr Kolodin
The original prime crew for Soyuz 11 consisted
of Alexei Leonov, Valeri Kubasov and Pyotr Kolodin. A medical X-ray
examination four days before launch suggested that Kubasov might
have tuberculosis, and according to the mission rules, the prime
crew was replaced with the back-up crew. For Dobrovolski and
Patsayev, this was to be their first space mission. After the
failure of Salyut 2 to orbit, Kubasov and Leonov were reassigned to
Soyuz 19 for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.
Mission parameters
Mass: 6,790 kg (15,000 lb)
Perigee: 163 km (101 mi)
Apogee: 237 km (147 mi)
Inclination: 51.5°
Period: 88.4 min
The Soyuz spacecraft was launched on June 7,
1971, from Baikonur Cosmodrome in central Kazakh SSR. Several
months earlier, the first mission to the Salyut, Soyuz 10, had
failed to successfully dock with the station. Soyuz 11, however,
successfully docked with Salyut 1 on June 7 and the cosmonauts
remained on-board for 22 days, setting space endurance records that
would hold until the American Skylab 2 mission in May-June
1973.
Upon first entering the station, the crew
encountered a smokey and burnt atmosphere and after replacing part
of the ventilation system spent the next day back in their Soyuz
until the air cleared. Their stay in Salyut was productive,
including live television broadcasts. However, a fire broke out on
day 11 of their stay causing mission planners to consider
abandoning the station. The planned highlight of the mission was to
have been the observation of an N-1 booster launch, but the launch
was postponed. The crew also found that using the exercise
treadmill as they were required to do twice a day caused the whole
station to vibrate. Pravda released news of the mission and regular
updates while it was in progress.
On June 30, 1971, after an apparently normal
re-entry of the capsule of the Soyuz 11 mission, the recovery team
opened the capsule to find the crew dead. It quickly became
apparent that they had been asphyxiated. The fault was traced to a
breathing ventilation valve, located between the orbital module and
the descent module, that had been jolted open as the descent module
separated from the service module, 723 seconds after retrofire. The
two were held together by explosive bolts designed to fire
sequentially; in fact, they fired simultaneously. The force of this
caused the internal mechanism of the pressure equalization valve to
loosen a seal that was usually discarded later and normally allowed
automatic adjustment of the cabin pressure. The valve opened at an
altitude of 168 kilometers (104 mi), and the gradual loss of
pressure was fatal within seconds. The valve was located beneath
the seats and was impossible to locate and block before the air was
lost. Flight recorder data from the single cosmonaut outfitted with
biomedical sensors showed cardiac arrest occurred within 40 seconds
of pressure loss. By 935 seconds after the retrofire, the cabin
pressure was zero, and remained there until the capsule hit the
Earth's atmosphere.
Film later declassified showed support crews
attempting CPR on the cosmonauts. It was not known until an autopsy
that they had died because of a capsule depressurization. The
ground crew had lost audio contact with the crew before re-entry
began and had already begun preparations for contingencies in case
the crew had been lost.
The cosmonauts were given a large state funeral
and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis at Red Square, Moscow
near the remains of Yuri Gagarin. U.S. astronaut Tom Stafford was
one of the pallbearers. They were also each posthumously awarded
the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. Craters on the Moon were named
after the three cosmonauts.
The Soyuz 11 landing coordinates are 47.35663°N
70.12142°E which is 90 km South West of Karazhal, Karagandy,
Kazakhstan and about 550 km North East of Baikonur. At the site is
a memorial monument in the form of a three-sided metallic column.
Near the top of the column, on each of the three sides, is the
engraved image of the face of each crew member set into a stylized
triangle. The memorial is in open, flat country, far from any
populated area. It is within a small, circular, fenced area.
The Soyuz spacecraft was extensively redesigned
after this incident to carry only two cosmonauts. The extra room
meant that the crew could wear space suits during launch and
landing. A Soyuz capsule would not hold three crew members again
until the Soyuz-T redesign in 1980, which freed enough space for
three people in lightweight pressure suits to travel in the
capsule.
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