Kubasov, Valery

Valery Kubasov, (born January 7, 1935, Vyazniki, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died February 19, 2014, Moscow, Russia), Russian cosmonaut who performed the first welding experiments in space.

Upon graduating from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1958, Kubasov worked for the design bureau of Soviet spacecraft designer Sergey Korolyov and was the author of studies on spaceship trajectories. In 1966 he was accepted into the cosmonaut program and began spaceflight training.

On October 11, 1969, Kubasov made his first flight aboard Soyuz 6, where with the crews of Soyuz 7 and 8 he participated in the first group spaceflight. As flight engineer, Kubasov was the first person to weld in space. Kubasov was later chosen for the Soyuz 11 crew, which would man the first space station, Salyut 1. However, Kubasov was thought to have contracted tuberculosis, and his crew was grounded days before launch. On June 29, 1971, the cosmonauts who replaced Kubasov’s crew died during reentry of Earth’s atmosphere when their capsule accidentally decompressed.

In 1975 Kubasov returned to space on a mission that accomplished the first joint Soviet-American spaceflight. The Soyuz 19 linked with the American spaceship Apollo on July 17. Kubasov spent nearly five hours in the Apollo command and docking modules. He launched on his final flight on May 26, 1980, as commander of Soyuz 36, an Intercosmos mission to the Salyut 6 space station with the first Hungarian cosmonaut, Farkas Bertalan. After his retirement from spaceflight, Kubasov became deputy director of the Russian spacecraft manufacturer RKK Energia.