fyeahcosmonauts-blog

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Liftoff of Energia-Buran!

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Roscosmos on facebook shared this video of Buran, Russia's answer to the space shuttle, on its only flight on 15 November 1988. The 3 hour and 25 minute unmanned test flight launched and landed at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Unfortunately, this one was destroyed when the hangar it was in collapsed.

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It’s almost time to launch - Energia-Buran a few hours before the flight, 15 November, 1988.

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Adiós a Alexánder Serebrov (1944-2013).

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Nooo! This is the second cosmonaut in the past two weeks that has passed away. :(

Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov was the only Cosmonaut to pilot the Soviet answer to the MMU - an apparatus called the Cosmonaut Maneuvering Unit. Named Icarus, trial runs were made outside the Mir space station during Serebrov’s TM-8 mission in February, 1990, as seen in the photos above. He passed away on Monday, November 12, 2013 outside Moscow.

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I received this in my email! Very cool and it explains why I've tripled my followers in the space of a day or so. 

Welcome to all the new followers, hope you stick around and enjoy the tales from the Russian space program.

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Energia-Buran on pad 110.

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This Is How The Soyuz Reentry Rollercoaster Looks From The Inside

European Space Agency posted this amazing–20+ minutes long but worth watching–video about how astronauts return home from the ISS in the Soyuz space capsule, with never before seen inside footage.

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Things are winding up at the landing site. The crew is being taken care of in the medical tents now. They will fly to Karaganda, Kazakhstan and from there to Star City for Fyodor Yurchikhin and Houston for Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano.

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Luca Parmitano is finally out and happy to be home.

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Karen Nyberg is out and looking cool. The medics were around her for a such a long time, I was beginning to worry if she was alright. And Fyodor has the torch now.

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Fyodor Yurchikhin and the torch are out. Fyodor's looking pretty good.

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The crew is back home now! The video cut out just as the Soyuz hit the ground, so I only got a shot of it after the impact.

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Here comes Soyuz TMA-09M! About 7 or 6 minutes until they land.

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Nyberg, Parmitano and Yurchikhin Landing coverage

The three astronauts are now in the soyuz that will bring them home.

NASA will cover the launch as follows (times in eastern time):

6 p.m. - ISS Expedition 37/Soyuz TMA-09M Undocking Coverage (undocking scheduled at 6:26 p.m. ET) - JSC (All Channels) 8:30 p.m. - ISS Expedition 37/Soyuz TMA-09M Deorbit Burn and Landing Coverage (Deorbit burn scheduled at 8:55 p.m. ET, landing near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan scheduled at 9:49 p.m. ET) - JSC via Kazakhstan(All Channels) 11 p.m. - Video File of the ISS Expedition 37/Soyuz TMA-09M Landing and Post-Landing Activities - HQ (All Channels)

The footage can also be followed on the spaceflight101 live website, they give the following schedule:

Undocking: November 10, 2013 Undock Time: 23:26 UTC Deorbit Burn: 1:55 UTC (Nov 11) Landing: 2:49 UTC (Nov 11) Mission Duration: 166 Days

Or you can follow the same stream on the ESA website, with yet another set of times:

00:00 CET Monday - Soyuz TMA-09M undocking 02:30 CET Monday - Soyuz TMA-09M deorbit burn and landing

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@NASASpaceflight: First view of the Olympic torch heading outside of the ISS

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3/20/73: “Soviet cosmonauts Aleksei S. Yeliseyev, left, and Vladimir A. Shatalov, right, get together with U.S. astronaut Thomas Stafford to look over a model of the linked up Apollo-Soyuz spacecrafts. The two cosmonauts are with a group of Soviet scientists and engineers that is at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to work out the details of the joint space mission which is scheduled for 1975. The two are candidates for the Soviet crew that is to be named soon. They met Stafford, who will team with Donald Slayton and Vance Brand on U.S. crew, Sunday.”

(The Soviet crewmen eventually chosen for the ASTP mission were Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov.)