Jähn, Sigmund

Sigmund Jähn, (born February 13, 1937, Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, Germany—died September 21, 2019, Strausberg), East German cosmonaut who became the first German in space.

As a young man Jähn trained to become a printer, but in 1955 he joined the East German air force, where he became a pilot and a military scientist. In 1966 he left East Germany to study at the Gagarin Military Air Academy in the Soviet Union. Upon completing his studies, he worked in pilot education and flight safety and applied his fluency in Russian to translating a number of Soviet military and political publications into German.

Jähn, Sigmund

In 1976 Jähn was selected to train as the first cosmonaut in the Soviet Intercosmos program. This program placed non-Soviet cosmonauts on routine flights with experienced Soviet cosmonauts in a campaign to demonstrate Soviet solidarity with Warsaw Pact states and other sympathetic countries. On August 26, 1978, Jähn lifted off with Soviet cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky aboard Soyuz 31. On the space station Salyut, he conducted scientific experiments before returning to Earth on Soyuz 29 on September 3, 1978.

Following the Intercosmos mission, Jähn was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honour. His home country of East Germany elevated him to a kind of socialist folk hero and proclaimed proudly that the first German in space had been not a West German but an East German citizen. In 1983 Jähn earned a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Central Institute for Physics of the Earth, at Potsdam. After the reunification of Germany, he represented the country and the European Space Agency as a consultant at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia.