COSPAR ID | 1978-023A | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SATCAT № | 10694 | ||||
Mission duration | 7 days, 22 hours, 16 minutes | ||||
Spacecraft properties | |||||
Spacecraft type | Soyuz 7K-T | ||||
Manufacturer | NPO Energia | ||||
Launch mass | 6,800 kilograms (15,000 lb) | ||||
Crew | |||||
Crew size | 2 | ||||
Members |
Aleksei Gubarev Vladimír Remek |
||||
Callsign | Зенит (Zenit – "Zenith") | ||||
Start of mission | |||||
Launch date | 2 March 1978, 15:28 | UTC||||
Rocket | Soyuz-U | ||||
Launch site | Baikonur 1/5 | ||||
End of mission | |||||
Landing date | 10 March 1978, 13:44 | UTC||||
Landing site | 51°N 67°E / 51°N 67°E | ||||
Orbital parameters | |||||
Reference system | Geocentric | ||||
Regime | Low Earth | ||||
Perigee | 198.9 kilometres (123.6 mi) | ||||
Apogee | 275.6 kilometres (171.2 mi) | ||||
Inclination | 51.65 degrees | ||||
Period | 88.95 minutes | ||||
Docking with Salyut 6 | |||||
|
Soyuz 28 (Russian: Союз 28, Union 28) was a 1978 Soviet manned mission to the orbiting Salyut 6 space station. It was the fourth mission to the station, the third successful docking, and the second visit to the resident crew launched in Soyuz 26.
Cosmonaut Vladimír Remek from Czechoslovakia became the first person launched into space who was not a citizen of the United States or the Soviet Union. The other crew member was Aleksei Gubarev. The flight was the first mission in the Intercosmos program that gave Eastern Bloc and other communist states access to space through manned and unmanned launches.
The Soyuz 28 mission was the first Intercosmos flight, whereby military pilots from Soviet bloc nations were flown on flights of about eight days to a Soviet space station. Pilots from other nations would eventually also fly. The program was a reaction to American plans to fly Western Europeans on Space Shuttle missions.
Vladimir Remek, the first non-Soviet, non-American to travel to space, was launched aboard Soyuz 28 on 2 March 1978, after a three-day delay of unspecified cause. The Soyuz commander was Russian cosmonaut Aleksei Gubarev. The crew docked with the orbiting Salyut 6 space station, and greeted the occupants Georgi Grechko and Yuri Romanenko who had arrived on Soyuz 26 in December. Gubarev and Grechko had previously flown together on Soyuz 17 to the Salyut 4 space station in 1975.