Word: salyut
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...Russian efforts to keep the incident quiet, Western sources reported that a Soviet cosmonaut narrowly avoided a similar fate in February. The near mishap apparently resulted from an unauthorized space walk by Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, 33, during last spring's record-breaking 96-day orbital flight aboard the Salyut 6 space station...
Only Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko, 46, had been slated to make a space walk; Romanenko was to remain behind at Salyut's open hatch. Both were wearing a new type of space suit equipped with a radio and an hour's supply of oxygen. Thus when cosmonauts are working outside an orbiting spacecraft, they require no umbilical link to the mother ship other than a simple tether to keep them from drifting off. Everything was going smoothly during Grechko's extraterrestrial stroll until Salyut passed over the western Pacific Ocean-out of range of Soviet ground stations. Suddenly...
...Bird's coverage, though steadily improving, is still limited by the amount of propellant aboard to about 220 days a year. Meanwhile, the Soviets have gained an intelligence edge by again manning their Salyut space station, which passes over the U.S. twice a day. U.S. intelligence officials believe the Russians are likely to keep cosmonauts in space from now on. American astronauts, on the other hand, will not revisit the Spacelab system until the new space shuttle is launched in 1980. The Soviets have another advantage in space: the "hunter-killer" satellite that can track an orbiting vehicle, sidle...
...making his first space flight, and Oleg Makarov, 44, his civilian flight engineer whose two previous Soyuz missions included a flight that was aborted and forced to land in the snows of Siberia near the Chinese border in 1975. After chasing the blinking red and blue lights of Salyut round the earth for a day, the cosmonauts caught up with the space station, clambered through a hatch and embraced their comrades, who quipped: "Now don't be chicken. We're friends in here." The newcomers even brought newspapers and letters from home. Then all four exchanged toasts...
...fact, their very first attempt to man Salyut 6 was an embarrassing flop. A week after it was sent aloft in September with no one on board, Soyuz 25 tried to link up with it, apparently as part of the Kremlin's celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution and the 20th anniversary of the flight of the first earth satellite, Sputnik. But Soyuz 25 slammed into one of Salyut's two docking ports, holding only briefly and then drifting away. Soviet controllers had to summon the cosmonauts back to earth...