Yuri Petrovich Artyuchin

Yuri Artyuchin
Country:	USSR
selected on	January 10, 1963
Calls:	1 space flight
Begin:	3rd July 1974
Landing:	July 19, 1974
Time in space:	15d 17h 30min
retired on	January 1982
Space flights
Soyuz 14 (1974)

Yuri Petrovich Artjuchin ( Russian: Юрий Петрович Артюхин ; born June 22, 1930 (other source: July 22) in Perschutino , Moscow Oblast ; † August 4, 1998 in Svyosdny Gorodok , Moscow Oblast) was a Soviet cosmonaut .

Life

Air Force

After graduating from middle school, Artyuchin entered an aviation school in 1948. After that, he served as a technician in the Air Force of the USSR . Artjuchin was delegated to the Zhukovsky Military Engineering Academy , which he successfully completed in March 1958. After graduation, he stayed at the academy and worked in a research laboratory. Among other things, he used the Soviet mainframe computer Minsk 2 .

Selection as a cosmonaut

In the course of 1962 Artjuchin went through the selection process for cosmonauts and was accepted into the cosmonaut group on January 8, 1963. This was the second group of candidates from the Air Force, and the first to not only include pilots.

Artjuchin completed his basic training with the exam on January 21, 1965. From March 1965 to January 1966 he trained for the planned long-term flight Woschod 3 . This flight was repeatedly postponed, but never officially canceled.

From the summer of 1965 Artjuchin was also under discussion as a flight engineer for an early Soyuz flight. However, the grouping was subject to constant change. At times he worked in the USSR's lunar program , which was canceled in 1969.

Artjuchin accompanied the group flight of Soyuz 6 , Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8 in October 1969 on the ship cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov , which was specially equipped for communication with the spaceships. This was repeated for the long-term Soyuz 9 flight in June 1970.

From January 1970 he trained for coupling flights of the Soyuz spaceships in orbit. He was assigned to commandant Pyotr Klimuk . This training was interrupted by a mission on the communications ship Akademik Sergei Koroljow for the flights from Soyuz 10 in April 1971 and Soyuz 11 in June 1971 to the DOS space station Salyut 1 . While Soyuz 11 was still in flight, Klimuk and Artjuchin were nominated for a mission on the second DOS space station. However, those plans were put on hold after the Soyuz 11 crew was killed on landing.

Almaz

From November 1971 Artjuchin trained for a mission on board the military space station Almaz . Its commandant was first Anatoly Fyodorov , later Pavel Popovich . The station was launched under the name Salyut 2 on April 3, 1973, but the ground station lost control after a short time, so that it could not be manned.

Flight to Salyut 3

The next Almaz station was launched on June 24, 1974 under the name Salyut 3 , this time successfully. On July 3, 1974, Popowitsch and Artjuchin took off in the Soyuz 14 spacecraft and docked with the space station the following day. Over the next two weeks, the cosmonauts carried out earth observations to determine their military value. Various medical experiments were also carried out. The landing took place on July 19. This was the Soviet Union's first successful space station mission. At that time, NASA had just successfully completed the third and final flight to the Skylab space station .

Salyut 5

From December 1974 Artjuchin worked as an instructor for cosmonauts in the Almaz program. During this time, three missions to the Almaz station Salyut 5 started : Soyuz 21 , Soyuz 23 and Soyuz 24 . With the landing of Soyuz 24 in February 1977, this program came to a temporary end.

TKS

From 1977 Artjuchin was trained as a crew for the TKS spaceship . It was much larger than the Soyuz spacecraft and was intended to be used for personnel and material transports to space stations. Artyukhin was placed under the command of Vladimir Koselsky along with Valery Romanov . A flight to another Almaz station could have taken place in 1981, but the Almaz program was canceled. Instead, flights to the DOS space stations Salyut 6 and Salyut 7 were planned. Artyuchin was part of Anatoly Berezovoy's team , along with flight engineer Dmitri Juyukov . In December 1981 these plans were also canceled. The TKS group was dissolved.

After the cosmonaut career

Artjuchin resigned from the cosmonaut corps on January 26, 1982 and worked in a leading position at the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center until December 1987 . In March 1988 Artyukhin resigned from the Air Force with the rank of colonel . He switched to the development office NPO Molnija , where he was responsible for the simulation software in the Buran program . In May 1992 he retired. He died in August 1998 after a long illness and was buried with military honors.

Private

Artyuchin was married and had two children.

Others

• Artyukhin was named Hero of the Soviet Union on July 20, 1974 and also received the Order of Lenin
• From 1975 to 1992 he was President of the Russian Ski Association
• He was the author of a book on the stabilized rotation of spacecraft

Web links

Commons : Juri Artjuchin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography at spacefacts.de
• Juri Petrowitsch Artjuchin in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)
• Biography at astronaut.ru (Russian)