Valentin Vitalievich Lebedev

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Valentin Vitalievich Lebedev
Valentin Vitalievich Lebedev
Valentin Lebedev on a Soviet postage stamp (right, with Anatoly Berezovoy )
Country: USSR
selected on March 22, 1972
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		18th December 1973
Landing of the
last space flight: 		December 10, 1982
Time in space: 219d 6h 0min 7s
EVA inserts: 1
EVA total duration: 2h 33min
retired on February 25, 1993
Space flights

Valentin Lebedev ( Russian Валентин Витальевич Лебедев , scientific. Transliteration Valentin Lebedev Vital'evič * 14. April 1942 in Moscow , Russian SFSR ) is a former Soviet cosmonaut .

Life

Start of career

Lebedev studied at the Moscow State Aviation Institute (MAI), which he left in 1966 as an engineer. He then joined the OKB-1 design office (later names: ZKBEM and Energia ), which developed the Soyuz spacecraft and the Zond lunar probe, among other things .

As part of the Soviet lunar program , Lebedev worked in the field of dumping and salvaging the return capsule. He later trained cosmonauts and worked on methods for a manual rendezvous between a Soyuz spaceship and a DOS- type space station , which was also developed at ZKBEM.

Selection to the cosmonaut

From 1969 Lebedev was in the application phase for the Soviet cosmonaut corps. On March 22, 1972, he was selected as a test cosmonaut. His group included two other engineers from ZKBEM ( Boris Andrejew and Juri Ponomarjow ), an engineer from the design office ZKBM ( Valeri Makruschin ) and three doctors from the Institute for Microbiological Problems.

Soyuz 13

From July 1972 Lebedev worked in the support team for a Soyuz flight, in which the astrophysical camera Orion 2 should be used. In September 1973 he moved up to the substitute team and was assigned to commander Pyotr Klimuk . On December 7th, the State Commission made a decision that the originally planned cosmonauts Vorobyov and Yazdovsky should not be deployed and Klimuk and Lebedev moved up.

Klimuk and Lebedew were both only 31 years old, making them the youngest crew on a multi-seat spaceship. Lebedev also had the shortest training course of a Soviet Soyuz cosmonaut to date, with only 21 months between selection and first flight. Only doctor Oleg Atkov would stay under this mark in 1984 with less than a year.

Klimuk and Lebedew started Soyuz 13 on December 18, 1973 . Both astrophysical recordings and earth observations were carried out with the Orion-2 camera. The flight also served to test various onboard systems that had been reworked after the Soyuz 11 accident . The landing took place on December 26th in a snow storm.

Salyut 6

From December 1977 Lebedev was prepared for a mission on board the new Salyut 6 space station and assigned to Commander Leonid Popov . Popov and Lebedev formed the support team for the first and second long-term crew ( Salyut 6 EO-1 and Salyut 6 EO-2 ), after which Popov and Lebedev moved up to the backup team for the third mission Salyut 6 EO-3 , which took place in February 1979 started.

Popov and Lebedev were planned as the fourth team ( Salyut 6 EO-4 ), but in March 1980 Lebedev sustained a knee injury while jumping on the trampoline, which made his use impossible. Lebedev had to be replaced and was no longer used on Salyut 6.

Salyut 7

From September 1981 Lebedev trained for a mission on board the new Salyut 7 space station . Together with Commander Anatoly Berezovoy he was to form the first long-term crew Salyut 7 EO-1 .

Berezovoy and Lebedev took off on May 13, 1982 with the Soyuz T-5 spacecraft , docked with the Salyut the following day and put the station into operation.

At the end of June, a Soyuz T-6 crew came on board, whose crew included Jean-Loup Chrétien , the first French spaceman. In the further course of the mission, Berezovoy and Lebedev carried out a space exit on July 30, 1982 . A second short-term mission was used to exchange spaceships. Soyuz docked T-7 on August 20 . The visiting crew took the Soyuz T-5 spacecraft back to Earth on August 27, 1982.

When Lebedev and Berezovoi landed in the Soyuz T-7 on December 10, 1982, they had set a new long-term record for a space flight of 211 days.

After the space flights

From 1983 Lebedew was trained as a flight engineer for the space glider Buran . Lebedev left the program in 1986, long before it was discontinued for financial and political reasons.

In November 1989 Lebedev entered the Soviet Academy of Sciences and became deputy director of the Institute of Geography there. In July 1991 he became head of the newly founded Center for Geographic Information Systems.

Lebedev officially resigned from the cosmonaut corps on February 25, 1993. In May 2000 he became the first cosmonaut to be appointed a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Publications

Lebedev has published 157 scientific articles and is the author or co-author of nine books. His recordings on board Salyut 7 have been published in Russian and English.

Others

  • Lebedev holds 26 patents.
  • He was president of the Soviet Acrobatics Association from 1975 to 1991.
  • From 1976 to 1991 he was a member of the Soviet National Olympic Committee.

Honors

Private

Lebedev is married and has one child.

literature

  • Peter Stache: spaceman from A to Z . Military publishing house of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin [East] 1988, ISBN 3-327-00527-3 .
  • Arkadi Iljitsch Ostaschew : Test of rocket and space technology - business of my life: events and facts . Korolev 2005, p. 284 . [1]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Valentin Vitalievich Lebedew in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).Template: JPL Small-Body Database Browser / Maintenance / Alt

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lebedev, Valentin Vitalievich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Лебедев, Валентин Витальевич (Russian); Lebedev, Valentin Vital'evič (ru-Latn)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet cosmonaut, engineer
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow , Russian SFSR, Soviet Union