Road to Peace

Abstract

With the return of Leonid Kizim, Vladimir Solovyov and Oleg Atkov from Salyut 7, the Soviet Union concluded 1984 in spectacular style: a new endurance record of almost 237 days, the first female spacewalker, the first woman to make a second mission, the first Indian cosmonaut and the first flight to feature six EV As. Moreover, in the case of the latter, all six excursions had been complex and challenging and had triumphantly repaired a damaged fuel line and successfully installed extensions to the space station’s electricity-generating solar arrays. The United States may have held the teclmological superiority in terms of the Shuttle’s systems, its reusability and its capacity to fly large crews, but Soviet cosmonauts had spent far longer in orbit in 1984 than had the Americans. The balance would change, to an extent, in 1985, when nine Shuttle flights took place … but even those would accrue, in total, barely eight weeks aloft.