It was April 19, 1971, and the next installment of Jacob’s journey was about to unfold. The Soviet Union had only recently embarked on space station operations with the launch of its first prototype, Salyut-1 [Sal-yoot], in low earth orbit. Two months later, on June 6,1971, Soyuz 11 [Soy-ooz] was to visit the orbiting space station with the cosmonauts, Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev on spaceship. The Soyuz 11 was launched in space and the three cosmonauts entered the Salyut-1 space station without any hitch on June 7, 1971 to conduct experiments for three weeks including cultivating Chinese cabbage and bulb onions , taking photographs of stars spectrograms, and also taking the photographs ‘from orbit’ of the snow and ice on the River Volga.

They were now heroes, famous, and plastered all over Soviet evening television. On June 29th, 1971, with the cosmonaut’s primary mission complete, the Soyuz 11 finally undocked from the Salyut-1, and three hours later, the spacemen fired their ship’s engine to return to Earth. Vladislav Volkov joked with flight control and asked them to make sure their traditional welcome-home gift of cognac would be waiting for them at the landing site.

At twenty-nine minutes before touchdown, and at an altitude of 160 kilometers [100 miles], explosive charges fired as planned to separate the Soyuz 11’s orbital bell-shaped capsule and instrument modules. The space capsule was now the cosmonaut’s only defense against the fiery furnace of re-entry.

But then something unexpected happened !

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