Word: cosmonaut
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...week's end, however, Fisher's star was eclipsed by a 34-year-old acrobatic pilot and parachutist named Svetlana Savitskaya, who blasted off with two male crew mates in the Soviet spaceship Soyuz T-7 on Thursday. She was only the second woman, after fellow Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, to make such a flight. With a superb sense of timing, the Soviets had sent Savitskaya into orbit in Unispace 82's closing hours...
...understandable then that Cosmonaut Vladimir Kovalyonok, 39, got a little sentimental last month when he and his rookie sidekick, Viktor Savinykh, 41, headed back to earth in an advanced Soyuz T spacecraft after 75 days in space. Theirs was the final visit of cosmonauts to Salyut, although it could be used for unmanned missions. The Soviets have indicated that they may dock an unmanned Cosmos satellite on Salyut soon, perhaps this week. After looking back at the ship for the last time, Kovalyonok rhapsodized: "It was so beautiful it gave my heart a pang...
From the very start of the missions, the remarkable effects of zero-g became apparent to Soviet doctors. Life aboard Salyut proved far from salutary. In spite of prolonged training on the ground, many of the cosmonauts could not hold their food down in the early days of a flight. Some had trouble getting to sleep, and were often awakened by the spacecraft's clattering and creaking. Others complained of fatigue and vertigo. In a revealing new book, Red Star in Orbit (Random House; $12.95), James Oberg offers some trenchant quotes from the flight diary of Salyut Cosmonaut Valeri...
Living aboard Salyut brought other hazards. In 1977, when Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko took a "space walk" outside the ship to look for some suspected damage, he suddenly saw his companion, Yuri Romanenko, drifting by. Romanenko, untethered to the spacecraft, had accidentally floated out of the cabin. Grechko caught Romanenko just as he was about to spin off into the void. On another flight, cosmonauts complained of repeated headaches. It turned out carbon dioxide was building up to dangerous levels in the cabin. The problem was solved by changing the air purifiers more often...
...first time in six years that Americans had been in space, and it came 20 years to the day after Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight. But for Columbia's commander, John Young, 50, it was old hat. During the fiery, jolting liftoff, his pulse hardly climbed above 85 beats a minute; this was, after all, Young's fifth such journey, the most by any American astronaut. Allowed Young: "It shook a little sharper. The vibration was more than what we experienced in the simulator." But the rookie Crippen could barely contain his excitement...