Soyuz 28

Mission highlights

The Soyuz 28 mission kicked off the Intercosmos program, which sent military pilots from Soviet-bloc countries on roughly eight-day trips to a Soviet space station. This initiative was a counter to American plans for Western European flights on the Space Shuttle. On 2 March 1978, after an unexplained three-day hold, Vladimir Remek launched as the first person from outside the Soviet Union or the United States to reach space. His commander was Aleksei Gubarev.

They docked with the Salyut 6 station and met the resident crew, Georgi Grechko and Yuri Romanenko, who had been aboard since December on Soyuz 26. Gubarev and Grechko had previously flown together on Soyuz 17 to Salyut 4 in 1975. The day after docking, the Soyuz 26 crew marked their surpassing of the 84-day endurance record set by Skylab 4 in 1974. Though politically motivated, the mission included science: an experiment tracking chlorella algae growth in microgravity, another using the Splav furnace to melt glass, lead, silver, and copper chlorides, and the Oxymeter study measuring oxygen in human tissue.

On 10 March, the Soyuz 28 crew packed up, tested systems, undocked, and landed 310 kilometers west of Tselinograd. A post-mission joke claimed Remek’s hand turned red because every time he reached for something, Soviet crewmates slapped it and said, “Don’t touch that!”