Abdul Ahad Momand

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Abdul Ahad Momand
Country: Afghanistan Democratic Republic 1987Afghanistan Afghanistan
selected on February 12, 1988
Calls: 1 space flight
Begin: August 29, 1988
Landing: September 7, 1988
Time in space: 8d 20h 26min
retired on September 7, 1988
Space flights

Abdul Ahad Momand , Pashto :عبدالاحد مومند, (Born January 1, 1959 in Sardah ) is a former cosmonaut from Afghanistan ; he was the first cosmonaut from Afghanistan. As a guest cosmonaut for the Soviet space agency, he spent several days on the Mir space station in 1988 .

Life

Momand grew up in Sardah and studied geology at the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul after high school . At the end of the 1980s he was drafted into military service. To avoid the unrest in Afghanistan, he volunteered for the air force. After the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, he completed pilot training in Krasnodar and later a command training in Kiev .

From 1987 he went through the selection process as one of about 400 volunteers for a Soviet-Afghan space flight. In February 1988 he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate along with Mohammad Masum . Momand completed his training at the cosmonaut training center "JA Gagarin" in the "Star City" Svyosdny Gorodok near Moscow .

Momand was initially intended as a substitute for Masum, whose nomination was withdrawn because of appendicitis . Momand started on August 29, 1988 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with the Soyuz TM-6 to the Mir space station , together with the commander of the spacecraft Vladimir Lyachow and the doctor Valeri Polyakov . Lyachow and Momand formed the short-term crew Mir EP-3 , while Polyakov was supposed to reinforce the long-term crew Mir EO-3 , consisting of Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov , who were already on board the Mir.

As a research cosmonaut, Momand took part in several astrophysical , biological and medical experiments. Lyachow and Momand left the new TM-6 spaceship at the Mir and disconnected from the Soyuz TM-5 on September 5 . However, the landing could not be carried out until 24 hours later after the system had been reprogrammed because the brake engines did not work, and later only malfunctioned.

Momand was a colonel in the Afghan Air Force and became Vice Minister for Aviation and Tourism in 1991. After the rise of the Islamist mujahideen in the Afghan civil war , he fled with his wife and daughter to India in 1992 and then to Germany , where his brother was already living. Momand now has German citizenship and lives in Ostfildern, Swabia . He works in a small trading company and plays volleyball at TSV Scharnhausen . He is married and has two daughters and a son. On the 25th anniversary of his space flight, he visited Afghanistan in 2013 and met the then President Hamid Karzai .

Awards

Momand was honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of Afghanistan on his return from space .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Klaus Eichmüller: From space on a detour into the German province. Stuttgarter Nachrichten , February 5, 2010, accessed on September 28, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c Afghanistan's First Cosmonaut to Sputnik: 'In Time of Danger, We Told Jokes'. Sputnik , October 27, 2017, archived from the original on October 27, 2017 ; accessed on September 28, 2018 (English).
  3. ^ A b Jenny Norton: Afghanistan's first spaceman returns home. BBC , March 23, 2014, accessed September 28, 2018 .
  4. ^ Christian Fahrenbach: The double hero. In: Main-Echo of April 15, 2010, accessed on November 22, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Momand, Abdul Ahad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mohmand, Abdul Ahad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION first Afghan cosmonaut
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Sardah , Afghanistan