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 9
Soyuz 9 was a 1970 Soviet manned space flight.
The two-man crew of Andrian Nikolayev and Vitali Sevastyanov broke
the five-year-old space endurance record with their nearly 18-day
flight. The mission paved the way for the Salyut space station
missions, investigating the effects of long-term weightlessness on
crew, and evaluating the work that the cosmonauts could do in
orbit, individually and as a team.
CrewPosition[2] Cosmonaut
Commander Andrian Nikolayev
Second spaceflight
Flight Engineer Vitali Sevastyanov
First spaceflight
Backup CrewPosition Cosmonaut
Commander Anatoli Filipchenko
Flight Engineer Georgi Grechko
Reserve CrewPosition Cosmonaut
Commander Vasili Lazarev
Flight Engineer Valeri Yazdovsky
Commander Andrian Nikolayev and flight-engineer
Vitali Sevastyanov spent eighteen days in space conducting various
physiological and biomedical experiments on themselves, but also
investigating the social implications of prolonged spaceflight. The
cosmonauts spent time in two-way TV links with their families,
watched the World Cup football game, played chess (including this
chess game with the crew as white; it was the first chess game
played across space) with ground control, and voted in a Soviet
election. The mission set a new space endurance record and marked a
shift in emphasis away from spacefarers merely being able to exist
in space for the duration of a long mission (such as the Apollo
flights to the moon) and being able to live in space.
On their return to Earth, the crew was found to
have weakened considerably, and it took some ten days for them to
regain their strength. In orbit, they had sacrificed some of their
exercise time for the sake of carrying out their scientific work,
and their bodies´ reactions to the prolonged weightlessness
emphasised the importance of maintaining regular exercise.
Mission parameters
Mass: 6590 kg (14,530 lb)
Perigee: 176 km (109 mi)
Apogee: 227 km (141 mi)
Inclination: 51.6°
Period: 88.5 min
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