QuickCheck: Was a man stranded in space for 311 days when his nation collapsed?

AT first glance, the idea must sound like something from a horror movie or an absurd comedy; a man stuck in space because the nation that sent him into orbit had ceased to exist.

So when one reads that a Soviet cosmonaut was stuck in space for a total of 311 days because the Soviet Union collapsed and became the cash-strapped, smaller Russian Federation, could this be a case of a true story being as strange or perhaps even stranger than fiction?

VERDICT:

TRUE:

Yes, a cosmonaut named Sergei Krikalev was stranded in space for 311 days – which is just over 10 months – due to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Krikalev had been sent on a mission to the Mir space station in May 1991 when the Soviet Union was still intact. However, while he was in space, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the country was renamed the Russian Federation.

Krikalev's mission was originally supposed to last for five months, but he ended up staying in space for a total of 10 months. He eventually returned to Earth in March 1992, after the Russian Federation had the funds to send up a suitably-trained replacement.

That replacement was German astronaut Klaus-Dietrich Flade, a pilot and trained engineer in his own right.

As for why it took so long to get him home? Well, Krikalev was both an experienced engineer and a veteran cosmonaut – so while others like Austrian Franz Viehböck could be sent up to join him on Mir for short periods, his technical expertise was needed to keep the space station running in orbit.

Indeed, Krikalev could have gone home using a Soyuz capsule docked to Mir, but choosing the easy way out could have doomed the future of the entire station.

Prior to his 1991 mission, Krikalev was on the ground control team that planned the in-orbit rescue mission when the Soviets lost contact with one of their previous space stations called Salyut 7. Following that, he had a prior stint aboard Mir as the flight engineer in a 1988 mission that lasted for 151 days.

Ultimately, Krikalev – often dubbed “the last Soviet citizen” - would return to space several times after his 311-day stint; he retired in 2009 with a total logged time of 803 days, nine hours and 38 minutes to his credit.

SOURCES:

1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-last-soviet-citizen

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20110908083511/http://www.energia.ru/eng/iss/iss11/krikalev.html

3. http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/cosmonauts/english/krikalyov_sergei.htm