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November 23, 1935: Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov was born in the city of Moscow. Volkov became a cosmonaut in 1966 as the first group of engineer cosmonauts from Energia. It took some time for his group to be assigned to a mission, due to political wrangling between Mishin and Kaminin, but eventually Volkov flew. In 1969, he participated in the flight of Soyuz 7 -- part of an ambitious three-spacecraft plan where Soyuz 7 and 8 are to dock while Soyuz 6 observes and takes unprecedented footage. (Even today, this has not been done. A Soyuz did photograph the undocking of a Space Shuttle from Mir, but never a docking.) Unfortunately, the docking is unsuccessful and all three spacecraft return to Earth. Volkov had at least nominally been in the path for a lunar mission, but as lunar missions became progressively more unlikely, he ended up on track for the newly launched DOS station: Salyut 1. He was scheduled for the Soyuz 11 backup crew. When one of the prime crew developed symptoms of tuberculosis, the entire prime crew (led by the famous spacewalker Leonov) was replaced by the backup crew. As Soyuz 10 had failed to hard dock with Salyut 1, Volkov, aboard Soyuz 11, would become one of the first three men to live on board a space station. Unexpectedly, this saved Leonov's life, and he would later go on to command the Soviet half of the ASTP mission, the first international manned space mission. Volkov and the rest of the backup crew were not so lucky. The first ten days of life on Salyut 1 went very well. On day 11, there was a fire on board Salyut 1. The crew evacuated to Soyuz 11, but the fire went out and they were able to get the air tolerable again. On day 12, flight controllers became concerned about Volkov, as he appeared to have taken credit for most of what was done in the day 11 crisis. Meanwhile, the suits worn to simulate the effects of gravity were tiring to the cosmonauts but weren't really doing much good, the treadmill was abandoned bec <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>