Soyuz TM-20 was the twentieth expedition to the Russian
Space Station
A space station (or orbital station) is a spacecraft which remains orbital spaceflight, in orbit and human spaceflight, hosts humans for extended periods of time. It therefore is an artificial satellite featuring space habitat (facility), habitat ...
Mir
''Mir'' (, ; ) was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, first by the Soviet Union and later by the Russia, Russian Federation. ''Mir'' was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to ...
. It launched Russian cosmonauts
Aleksandr Viktorenko
Aleksandr Stepanovich Viktorenko (; 29 March 1947 – 9 August 2023) was a Soviet and Russian cosmonaut.
Viktorenko was selected as a cosmonaut on 23 March 1978 and retired on 30 May 1997. He was commander of Soyuz TM-3, Soyuz TM-8, Soyuz T ...
,
Yelena Kondakova
Yelena Vladimirovna Kondakova (; born 30 March 1957) is the third Soviet or Russian female cosmonaut to travel to space and the first woman to make a long-duration spaceflight. Her first trip into space was on Soyuz TM-20 on 4 October 1994. She ...
, and German cosmonaut
Ulf Merbold
Ulf Dietrich Merbold (; born 20 June 1941) is a German physicist and astronaut who flew to space three times, becoming the first West German citizen in space and the first non-American to fly on a NASA spacecraft. Merbold flew on two Space Shu ...
.
Crew
Mission highlights
The flight carried 10 kg of equipment for use by Merbold in ESA's month-long
Euromir
94 experiment program. During automatic approach to Mir's front port, the
spacecraft yawed unexpectedly. Viktorenko completed a manual docking
without additional incident.
See also
*
Timeline of longest spaceflights
Many of the first human spaceflights set records measured in hours and days, the space station missions of the 1970s and 1980s pushed this to weeks and months, and by the 1990s the record was pushed to over a year and has remained there into the ...
References
External links
Spaceflight Mission Report
{{Orbital launches in 1994
Crewed Soyuz missions
Spacecraft launched in 1994