18 December 2024 marked the 90th birthday of Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Boris Volynov, the last of the first group of cosmonauts referred to as the “Gagarins”.
In January 1969, Volynov took part in the world’s first in-orbit docking of two manned spacecraft, the Soyuz-4 and Soyuz-5. As Volynov prepared for a solo re-entry, Soyuz 5’s equipment module failed to separate properly following retrofire due to the misfiring of explosive bolts, and consequently blocked the re-entry heat shield on the base of the descent module. As a result of the added mass of the equipment module, Volynov lost control of Soyuz 5, which began to tumble, finally stabilizing itself with the thinnest part of the spacecraft facing forward. As the assembly entered the atmosphere, the stress and heat on the supporting struts between the modules finally made them burn through and part, allowing the equipment module to fall away and burn up on re-entry. Volynov could only wait while the descent module’s automatic orientation system tried to regain control, which fortunately it managed to do with the heat shield facing forward.
Following re-entry, the ship had fallen along a ballistic trajectory at a tremendous speed – Volynov suffered acceleration loads of up to 10G , and the module’s parachutes deployed only partially, and a failure of the soft-landing retrorockets in the base of the descent module caused a hard landing which almost wrecked the module, and Volynov received serious injuries.
The Soyuz re-entry vehicle ended up 600 km from the planned landing site and the cosmonaut found himself in the snowy Kazakh steppe at a temperature of -38º C. By sheer luck, he was noticed from a passing passenger plane. He miraculously survived, but was only able to fly for a second time in 1976, this time on the Soyuz-21 spacecraft.
Boris Volynov’s flight on Soyuz-5 in 1969 was also interesting because it was the first time a Jewish cosmonaut had flown into space (Volynov’s mother was Jewish by nationality). Because of his Jewish blood, a curious letter was sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU on behalf of workers from one of the space industry plants, expressing indignation at the fact that a Jew was being sent into space. Anti-Semitism was a widespread phenomenon in the USSR, and the space industry was no exception.
The letter was marked SECRET by the receiving party, and without any obvious signs of having been declassified. The date on the letter is 2 January 1969, which is most likely the date it was received, rather than sent. Handwritten at the bottom of the letter is the notation “Presented to comrade D.F. Ustinov.” Our translation of this letter follows:
Translating History 