Leonid Popov

Leonid Popov: Six Months in a Station That Would Not Stay Fixed

Leonid Popov was not supposed to fly with Valery Ryumin. The assigned flight engineer for Soyuz 35, Valentin Lebedev, tore up his knee on a trampoline shortly before launch, and the backups had never flown. So the Soviet programme went to Ryumin — who had returned from a six-month tour aboard the same space station only eight months earlier — and offered him a choice: go again now, or the mission slips. He said yes. His family, by the official account, was not pleased. On 9 April 1980 the two men launched to Salyut 6 and stayed for 185 days.

Oleksandriia

Leonid Ivanovich Popov was born on 31 August 1945 in Oleksandriia, in Kirovohrad Oblast in the Ukrainian SSR, three months after the end of the war in Europe. He went the standard route for a Soviet cosmonaut of his generation: the air force first, flying, and then selection into the cosmonaut corps on 27 April 1970. He waited a decade for a seat. By the time he got one he was thirty-four, and he would command all three of the flights he made.

Salyut 6, 1980

The Soyuz 35 expedition is the one that matters. Popov and Ryumin lived aboard Salyut 6 from April to October 1980 — 185 days, which was then the longest human spaceflight ever undertaken. The record was not, in the end, formally ratified by the International Astronautical Federation, because the rules required a new mark to beat the old one by ten percent and 185 days fell short of that bar against the previous 175-day flight. The bureaucratic footnote is a fair emblem of the whole endeavour.

What the two men actually did for six months was maintenance. Salyut 6 was by then an ageing station operating well past its design intent, and the crew replaced attitude-control and life-support components, installed a new warning system, and repaired the Kaskad attitude control system. This is the unromantic reality of the early space stations: the hardware degraded faster than anyone had planned for, and the resident crew's principal function was to keep it alive.

They also ran a hotel. Four visiting missions arrived during their stay, three of them Intercosmos flights carrying the first cosmonaut from a Soviet-aligned country: Bertalan Farkas of Hungary on Soyuz 36 in May, Pham Tuan of Vietnam on Soyuz 37 in July, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez of Cuba on Soyuz 38 in September, plus the Soyuz T-2 test flight with Yury Malyshev and Vladimir Aksyonov in June. Popov and Ryumin came home on 11 October 1980 in the Soyuz 37 spacecraft, having swapped ferries so that the fresher vehicle would carry them down.

Two More Flights

Popov's second mission was Soyuz 40, launched on 14 May 1981 with the Romanian Dumitru Prunariu. It lasted seven days, twenty hours and forty-one minutes across 124 orbits, and it closed two chapters at once: the last of the original Soyuz spacecraft, and the final Soyuz to dock with Salyut 6, ending the first phase of Intercosmos. The four men aboard ran twenty-two experiments — cerebral blood flow, crystal growth in weightlessness, radiation dosimetry, protective coatings.

His third was Soyuz T-7, launched 19 August 1982 with Alexander Serebrov and Svetlana Savitskaya, who became the second woman ever to fly in space — nineteen years after Valentina Tereshkova — and the first to visit a space station. They spent about eight days aboard Salyut 7 with the resident crew, then returned in the older Soyuz T-5, leaving their newer vehicle behind for the long-duration crew. Popov's total: 200 days, 14 hours and 45 minutes across three flights. He retired from the cosmonaut corps on 13 June 1987 and reached the rank of major general in the Soviet Air Force.

Why Leonid Is Called a Genius

The Soviet space programme was extremely good at producing heroes and the word should be handled sceptically here. Popov was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, three times awarded the Order of Lenin, and made a national hero of Vietnam, Romania and Cuba into the bargain — decorations that reflect political utility at least as much as individual achievement.

The defensible claim is narrower and more technical. A Soyuz commander in 1980 was a pilot operating a spacecraft with primitive automation and no margin: rendezvous and docking with a station in low orbit is a problem of orbital mechanics in which intuition actively misleads, since thrusting forward raises your orbit and slows your closing rate. Commanders trained for years to hand-fly that approach when the automatic system failed, and to fly the descent module through a ballistic re-entry if the guided profile broke down. Popov did it three times without incident.

The more substantive work was the six months of repairs. Popov and Ryumin were operating a station whose life-support and attitude-control hardware was failing in ways its designers had not anticipated, with no possibility of resupplying a component that had not already been launched. Diagnosing an intermittent fault in an attitude control system with the tools on hand, in a module the size of a bus, is genuine engineering — done under time pressure, without a workshop, and with the consequence of failure being the loss of the station.

The honest counter-case is strong. Popov was a commander, not a designer; the analysis behind almost every repair was done by engineers on the ground and radioed up. Two of his three flights were short political showcases, flying a Romanian and then a Soviet woman as demonstrations of internationalism and progress, and he was the professional driver rather than the reason for the trip. He published nothing, invented nothing, and left no technical legacy under his own name. What he had was the specific competence the era demanded: the discipline to execute exacting procedures correctly on the thousandth repetition, and the psychological stability to spend six months in a confined, deteriorating machine with one other man and a rotating stream of guests. That is not genius. It is a rarer sort of reliability, and the programme could not have functioned without it.

Legacy

Popov's 185-day flight was a step in the sequence that took human beings from days in orbit to the year-long missions of Mir and the permanent occupation of the International Space Station; every long-duration crew since has faced the same two problems he faced, hardware that ages and people who tire. He is married with two children. In September 2023, as part of Ukraine's decommunisation programme, the street named after him in Kropyvnytskyi was renamed Independence Street — a reminder that a Ukrainian-born cosmonaut's honours were issued by a state that no longer exists, and that the country of his birth has since made its own decisions about whose names it keeps.

Achievements

• Educated at Gagarin Air Force Academy and Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia
• Worked as aircraft pilot, astronaut and politician