Soyuz TM-21

Soyuz TM -21 mission is the designation for the flight of a Russian Soyuz spaceship to the Russian space station Mir. It was the 21st visit to a Soyuz spacecraft with the Mir space station and the 97th flight in the Russian Sojusprogramm.

Crew

Start crew

  • Vladimir Nikolaevich Dezhurov ( first space flight ), Commander
  • Gennadi Mikhailovich Strekalow ( fifth space flight), flight engineer
  • Norman Earl Thagard ( fifth space flight ), science astronaut ( National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA / United States United States)

With this flight Strekalow reached as the second cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov by the Soviet / Russian record of five space flights. In addition, this was the first flight of a NASA astronaut aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

Backup crew

  • Anatoli Yakovlevich Solovyov, commander
  • Nikolai Mikhailovich Budarin, Flight Engineer
  • Bonnie Jeanne Dunbar, Wissenschaftsastronautin ( National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA / United States United States)

Return team

  • Anatoli Yakovlevich Solovyov ( 4 space flight), Commander
  • Nikolai Mikhailovich Budarin ( first space flight), flight engineer

Mission overview

After the launch at Baikonur, the coupling to the Mir space station and the handover of the station from the 17 crew of the three cosmonauts were the Mir- 18 crew, with Thagard was the first American on board the Mir simultaneously. While some spacewalks of the mission of Dezhurov and Strekalow were performed. So on May 12 (6h 14min ), May 17 (6h 41min ), May 22 (5h 14min ), May 28 ( 0h 21min ) and 1 June 1995 ( 0h 22min ) to carry out reconstruction work on the space station ( installation of solar panels and position change of the crystal module to the docking port ), where there were some technical problems. During the mission, the arrival and coupling of the Spektr module was made. Furthermore, some of medical research has been performed during the mission. All three astronauts returned with the docked space shuttle during the mission STS -71 back to Earth.

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