(Second Space Flight) Flight Engineer:

(First Space Flight)

Backup Crew: Commander:
Anatoly Filipchenko
Georgi Grenchko - Flight Engineer
Reserve Crew: Commander:
Vasily Lazarev
- Flight Engineer

Soyuz 9 (Russian: Союз 9, Union 9) was a 1970 Soviet manned space flight. The two-man crew of Andrian Nikolayevand Vitali Sevastyanov broke the five-year-old space endurance record held by Gemini 7, with their nearly 18-day flight. The mission paved the way for the Slayut 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.

The Soyuz Space Missions

Science Research

Science Research

Science Theories

Designed by Nigel G Wilcox

Pages within this section: Soyuz (AA)

Pages within this section:

courtesy: Wikipedia.org

The flight tested, for a longer period of time than any other, the capacity of the hardware and the human crew, on the long-term exposure to space conditions and observing (both visually and photographically) geological and geographical objects, weather formations, water surfaces, and snow and ice covers. The crew conducted observations of celestial bodies and practiced astronavigation, by locking onto Vega or Canopus, and then used a sextant to measure its relation to the Earth horizon. The orbital elements were refined to three decimal places by the crew.

Commander Andriyan Nikolayev and flight engineer Vitaly Sevastyanov spent 18 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 matches in the 1970 FIFA World Cup, 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) to being able to live in space. The mission took an unexpected physical toll on the cosmonauts; in order to conserve attitude control gas during the lengthy stay in orbit, Soyuz 9 was placed in a spin-stabilisation mode that made Nikolayev and Sevastyanov dizzy and space sick.

Soyuz-9 embarks on a record-breaking mission Soyuz-9 embarks on a record-breaking mission