Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov Russian - Владисла́в Никола́евич Во́лков; 23 November 1935 – 30 June 1971) was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 11 missions. The second mission terminated fatally.
Biography
Volkov graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute, 1959. As an aviation engineer at Korolyov Design Bureau, he was involved in the development of the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft prior to his selection as a cosmonaut. He flew aboard Soyuz 7 in 1969. Volkov, on his second space mission in 1971, was assigned to Soyuz 11. The three cosmonauts on this flight spent 23 days on Salyut 1, the world's first space station. After three relatively placid weeks in orbit, however, Soyuz 11 became the second Soviet space flight to terminate fatally, after Soyuz 1.
After a normal re-entry, the Soyuz 11 capsule was opened and the corpses of the three crew members were found inside. It was discovered that a valve had opened just prior to leaving orbit that had allowed the capsule's atmosphere to vent away into space, causing Volkov and his two flight companions to suffer fatal hypoxia as their cabin descended toward the earth's atmosphere.
Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov
Soyuz 7 Crew
Salyut 1, the world's first space station
Awards and remembrance
Vladislav Volkov was decorated twice as the Hero of the Soviet Union (first on 22 October 1969 and posthumously on 30 June 1971). He was also awarded the two Orders of Lenin and the title of Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR. His ashes were inturned in the Kremlin Wall on Red Square in Moscow.
The lunar crater Volkov and the minor planet 1790 Volkov are named in his honor. A street in Moscow is named after him. The "Yeniseyles" Soviet research/survey ship was renamed "Kosmonavt Vladislav Volkov" in his honor in 1974. A tomato variety from Ukraine was named Cosmonaut Volkov in his memory by his friend the space scientist and gardener Mikhailovich Maslov. Volkov is an honorary citizen of Kaluga and Kirov. 1973 to 2015 the Pilotcosmonaut-Volkov-Award (later Volkov-Cup) was given for the best sportsacrobatics, since 2016 called Zolotov-Cup; while alive, Volkov had become the first chairman of the Soviet Society of Sportsacrobatics in 1970.
Kremlin Wall Red Square in Moscow.
According to Brian Harvey's book Russia In Space, there was also a real Soviet communications ship called the Vladislav Volkov, but it was sold by the Russian government following the fall of the USSR.
An account of Volkov's life and space career appears in the 2003 book Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon by Colin Burgess.
The 'Akademik Vladislav Volkov', formerly the 'USS General Harry Taylor', a WW2 troop transport, which was then converted into the 'USS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg', is show here in Colonna Shipyard, in Norfolk, VA.
The ship started life as a troop transport during WW2, and was decommissioned in 1946. In 1964, she was recomissioned as the Vandenberg to serve as a missle range instrumentation ship for the US Air Force.
After it's decommissioning in the 1980s, she was transferred to the US Reserve Fleet on the James River in Virginia.
This ship was also featured in the movie 'Virus', and downloaded an electronic alien virus from MIR, while in the South Pacific, and killed off it's crew!
Now it's in Colonna shipyard on the Elizabeth River for environmental cleanup - she's destined to be sunk as an aquatic reef off the coast of Florida some time in 2008.
The rear radio dish is missing, as it was 'damage' used during the filming of 'Virus'.
Neat!
Artificial Reef - Sinking of the USS Hoyt Vandenberg - Jose Wejebe / Spanishflytv
USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg Wreck in Key West, FL - 2009 & 2010 Footage
On May 27th 2009 the ship USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg, was sunk about 7 miles off the coast of Key West making it the world’s second-largest intentionally sunk artificial reef. The vessel was originally built during WWII for troop transport.
On 1 July 1964, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg was acquired by the Navy and designated T-AGM-10, as a Missile Range Instrumentation Ship, one of ten such ships transferred from the Commander, Air Force Eastern Test Range, to MSTS. “Equipped with extremely accurate and discriminating radar and telemetry equipment,” she tracked and analyzed “re-entry bodies in the terminal phase of ballistic missile test flights,” carrying out those missile and spacecraft tracking duties in both Atlantic and Pacific waters until her retirement in 1983. She was ultimately stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 29 April 1993.
In 1998, some scenes of the horror/sci-fi film Virus were filmed aboard the ex-General Hoyt S. Vandenberg. The ship substituted for a Russian vessel known as the Akademik Vladislav Volkov, and some of the Cyrillic lettering applied for the film is still visible on the hull today.
Mir Russian: Мир, was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft. At the time it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station (ISS) after Mir's orbit decayed. The station served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and spacecraft systems with a goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space.
Life on a Space Station (The Mir Chronicles)
A view of Russia's Mir Space Station backdropped against a cloud-covered Earth. One of the solar array panels on the Spektr Module shows damage incurred during the impact of a Russian unmanned Progress re-supply ship which collided with the space station June 25, 1997.
NASA—Getty Images
Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995. Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits.
Valeri Polyakov
Following the success of the Salyut programme, Mir represented the next stage in the Soviet Union's space station programme. The first module of the station, known as the core modular or base block, was launched in 1986 and followed by six further modules. Proton rockets were used to launch all of its components except for the docking module, which was installed by U.S Space Shuttle mission STS-74 in 1995. When complete, the station consisted of seven pressurised modules and several unpressurised components. Power was provided by several photovoltaic arrays attached directly to the modules. The station was maintained at an orbit between 296km (184 mi) and 421 km (262 mi) altitude and travelled at an average speed of 27,700 km/h (17,200 mph), completing 15.7 orbits per day.
This week in 1995, the STS-74 mission launched aboard the space shuttle Atlantis from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. This was the second docking of the shuttle to the Russian Mir space station and continued Phase I activities, which led to the construction of the International Space Station later in the decade. Today, the Payload Operations Integration Center at Marshall serves as "science central" for the space station, working 24/7, 365 days a year in support of the orbiting laboratory's scientific experiments.
The station was launched as part of the Soviet Union's manned spaceflight programme effort to maintain a long-term research outpost in space, and following the collapse of the USSR, was operated by the new Russian Federal Space Agency (RKA). As a result, most of the station's occupants were Soviet; through international collaborations such as the Intercosmos, Euromir and Shuttle–Mir programmes, the station was made accessible to space travellers from several Asian, European and North American nations. Mir was deorbited in March 2001 after funding was cut off. The cost of the Mir programme was estimated by former RKA General Director Yuri Koptev in 2001 as $4.2 billion over its lifetime (including development, assembly and orbital operation).
Greg Chamitoff plays chess in the Harmony Node of the International Space Station on July 19, 2008.
ST. LOUIS CHESS CLUB
Of all imaginable things that could have happened during my time in space,
I had no idea that a chess match would be the most historic. Officially, in
the battle of the first-ever public Earth vs. space chess match, the winner
was Earth, but this is not the whole story. In fact, this was not the first
game. Even more, the winner may or may not be Earth. How could this be?
Well, the unofficial story is a little more intriguing and a lot more
amusing. Before my own first mission, I was a CapCom in NASA’s Mission
Control, the voice speaking to the crew onboard the International Space
Station (ISS). I was curious about the informal games that I saw several
crews play with those of us on the ground. The purpose was to boost morale
for the team and to have some sort of engagement beyond the daily grind of
executing procedures and solving problems. Of course, being involved in a
spaceflight mission is, and was, exciting stuff. But as with anything else,
the tasks of the day, in and of themselves, were simply that — tasks. They
created little opportunity for rapport between the crew and the ground. At
some point, the games began, and they were typically simple and silly
things, like guessing games and Trivial Pursuit. I distinctly recall
sitting on-console in Mission Control thinking, “When I fly, it’s going to
be a real game. A serious game. A chess game!”
As my turn to fly on ISS Expedition 17 approached, I began shopping for a chess set that I could adapt for zero gravity. I found the perfect set — a plastic-coated metallic board with magnetic pieces. I was in business. That is, until NASA saw this strange personal item on my manifest list with magnets. “No magnets allowed,” they said. “It could interfere with electronic devices onboard.” This was just a few weeks before launch, and I
panicked. Quarantine was a week away, so it was a busy time, and there was little time to purchase and receive something else. My solution, of course, was Velcro! I bought a cheap set of plastic pieces and packaged them with Velcro sheets. One of my first and most important tasks in space was to cut out circular pieces of Velcro and attach them to the bottom of 32 chess pieces. It worked! I had a zero gravity chess set and was ready to challenge Mission Control to a game.
ISS017-E-018998 (14 Oct. 2008) --- NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff (left), Expedition 17/18 flight engineer, and American spaceflight participant Richard Garriott pose for a photo in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station. Photo Credit: NASA
As part of an ISS program, the first Earth vs. space chess game was
naturally going to be a round-the-world engagement with all the primary
mission control centers involved:
Houston
Huntsville
Moscow
Montreal
Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
Tsukuba, Japan
Toulouse, France
The arrangement was that each control center would make a move in turn
without kibitzing between control centers. Little did I know that NASA
organized a small tiger team of enthusiastic chess players to assure that
NASA won. The first game didn’t go well—for Earth, that is! Taking turns
between countries to move ended up being a serious handicap. So much so
that I later heard that Moscow was politely furious with Japan for losing
the game. They demanded a Russian-only rematch, which resulted in multiple
ongoing simultaneous games with each country. Playing one game was easy
enough, but six simultaneous games was a stretch. After all, the mission
planners didn’t allocate time in the schedule for chess!
Before these games could finish, however, a few special folks on planet
Earth invented a bigger bolder version of Earth vs. space chess, that would
engage the public. The U.S. Chess Federation and the NASA Public Affairs
Office created a public game in which anyone on Earth could vote for their
favorite moves. A team of exceptional chess experts was selected to advise.
They were the third grade national chess champions from Stevenson
Elementary School in Bellevue, Washington. After each move from space, the
students would analyze the game, pick a handful of top moves and post them
online for public voting. This game did go well. It was a very exciting
game, with many twists and turns, but ultimately Earth was victorious.
There is a deeper meaning to this victory. If the third grade team beat me,
and I beat Mission Control, then the inescapable conclusion is that the
third grade team is smarter than Mission Control. Right? This was all so
fun and inspiring that we did it again three years later during the last
mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-134). It was a fast-paced game with
space represented by Box and Taz (my crewmate Gregory Johnson and myself).
Being a much shorter mission, the game was completed on the ground on Sept.
10, 2011, during the inaugural ceremony of the Boy Scouts of America chess
merit badge, which was spearheaded by Jeanne Sinquefield. With grandmasters
leading the charge, scouts acted out the game on a life-size board in the
streets of St. Louis. Trailing by a pawn that was sacrificed for an upper
hand on the offensive that Box and I maintained for much of the game, Earth
vs. space ultimately came to a stalemate. It seems that another rematch is
in order during a future mission. Perhaps next time, space will be
represented by a female moon-walking Eagle Scout. By the way, ISS
Expedition 17 and Space Shuttle STS-134 were spectacular missions that
helped pave the way for future exploration of our solar system. Special thanks to Hal Bogner (US Chess Federation)
and Kelly Humphries (NASA) for making this all possible, and to the St.
Louis Chess Club, World Chess Hall of Fame and Boy Scouts of America for
their roles in the Earth vs. space chess competition.
Gregory Chamitoff served as a NASA astronaut for 15 years, including
Shuttle Missions STS-124, 126, 134 and Space Station long-duration missions
Expedition 17 and 18. He has lived and worked in space for almost 200 days
as a flight engineer, science officer and mission specialist. He is also a
member of the St. Louis Chess Club, a partner of St. Louis Public Radio.
STS-134 Endeavour's Last Mission. May 16, 2011
STS-134 Endeavour's Last Mission. May 16, 2011
One of the Expedition 27 crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) recorded this image of the space shuttle Endeavour as the two spacecraft made their relative approach on May 18, 2011. Each spacecraft was occupied by six crew members until the STS-134 astronauts entered the ISS minutes following the docking.
