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Cosmonaut Valery Ryumin, a Soviet tank commander who spent more than a year in space breaking endurance records and then embarked on another flight 18 years later, this time on a US space shuttle, died Monday. He was 82 years old.
The Russian federal space company Roscosmos announced his death. The company’s director, Dmitry Rogozin, described Mr. Ryumin’s death as an “irreparable loss”, but did not say where he died or give a reason.
Mr. Ryumin’s first mission on Soyuz 25 was supposed to last 90 days, but ended after just two days when the vehicle did not dock with the Salyut 6 orbital space station.
On his next two missions, Mr. Ryumin and his teammates set space endurance records: 175 days on Soyuz 32 with Vladimir Lyalbov in 1979 and 185 days on Soyuz 35 with Leonid Popov in 1980.
These early flights were considered invaluable for their scientific advances. They were also grist for propaganda.
Mr. Ryumin and his team conducted experiments that included testing gamma-ray telescopes and hatching quail eggs. They hosted the first Cuban, Hungarian and Vietnamese cosmonauts on the space station and appeared live on a video screen at the Moscow stadium during the 1980 Summer Olympics.
When Mr. Ryumin retired in 1980 after his third mission, he had logged 362 days in space; this was a record for any cosmonaut or astronaut at the time.
From 1981 to 1989 he was flight director of the Salyut 7 and Mir space stations. (In 1985, Salyut went awry and was recaptured by the Soviets in a rescue operation that became the basis for the 2017 Russian movie “Salyut 7.) Russian space agency.
In 1998, 18 years after his third and possibly last flight, Mr. Ryumin applied to join the crew of the US space shuttle Discovery STS-91. The shuttle is planned to dock with the Russian space station Mir, which has been in orbit for 12 years.
“After three flights in the ’80s, I thought it would be nice to fly for the fourth time,” he said. interview with NASA two months before launch.
I thought it would be very beneficial for someone who has very good flight experience and life experience to visit the station.” “I believe I can see more detail and more things compared to younger cosmonauts or crew members.”
Mr. Ryumin had to lose around 55 pounds to qualify for the post. Discovery docked with Mir in June 1998; He spent four days on the space station before returning home, recording a total of 371 days in space on all four missions.
“We learned a lot during these joint operations in the Phase 1 program” said. “We learned to understand each other. We got acquainted with the philosophy of each country.”
Valery Victorovich Ryumin was born on August 16, 1939 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in the Russian Far East. In 1958 he graduated from the Kaliningrad Technical College of Mechanical Engineering.
He was an army tank commander from 1958 to 1961, and in 1965 earned a diploma in electronics and computer technology from the Moscow Institute of Forestry Engineering, where he specialized in spacecraft control systems.
After working for the Rocket and Space Company, Mr. Ryumin joined the cosmonaut corps in 1973. He was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union.
Among the survivors is his wife, Yelena Kondakova, a cosmonaut; their daughter Yevgenia; and Natalya Ryumina’s two children from a previous marriage, Viktoria and Vadim.
When Mr. Ryumin was a graduate student, he was training at the company that produced the first Sputnik satellite. However, he said in a NASA interview that he never imagined himself to one day orbit the Earth.
“It was like a big fantasy back then and I could never have imagined that I would have to do what I did,” she said. “I could never have imagined that.
“Now children can dream and say, ‘I’m going to be an astronaut or a cosmonaut,’ from an early age.” “People of my generation couldn’t have imagined it because they didn’t know what to imagine back then.”
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