Cosmonaut helped thaw Cold War in space

Valery N. Kubasov, who pioneered international cooperation in space when he joined with a fellow cosmonaut in the linkup of Soviet and U.S. spaceships in July 1975 amid the tensions of the Cold War, died Feb. 19 in Moscow. He was 79.

The Russian spacecraft manufacturing company Energia, for which he had worked as a deputy director, confirmed the death. No cause was given.

The great-power rivalry that had consumed the United States and the Soviet Union since World War II was paused when a Soyuz spaceship flown by Mr. Kubasov, a civilian serving as flight engineer, and its commander, Lt. Col. Alexei Leonov, docked about 140 miles above the Earth with a threeman Apollo capsule.

The cosmonauts and astronauts — Brig. Gen. Thomas Stafford, and Deke Slayton and Vance Brand, both civilians — spent 44 hours together, exchanging gifts and conducting scientific experiments, while their spacecrafts were linked.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent good wishes in a message transmitted by Soviet space officials.

President Gerald Ford spoke to the crews by telephone as they carried out a mission that presaged the creation of an international space station.

Mr. Kubasov was a low-key technical expert in contrast with Col. Leonov, who had a ready wit and usually deferred to him in answering scientific questions from reporters.

He spoke slowly, both in Russian and a halting English.

Interviewed while watching the Soviet-American mission on television from the Soviet Union, Lyudmila Kubasov, an aeronautical engineer, was quoted by The Associated Press as calling her husband “calm, restrained, not excitable.”

Valery Kubasov provided a televised travelogue and history lesson during a pass over the Soviet Union.

“Our country occupies onesixth of the Earth’s surface,” he noted. “Its population is over 250 million people. It consists of 15 union republics.”

When the spaceships were high above the city formerly known as Stalingrad, he noted that it was where “German Fascists were defeated” in World War II.

Pondering which half of the Earth was the more beautiful, the Western or Eastern Hemispheres, he avoided controversy, saying, as quoted by The Telegraph of Britain, “there is nothing more beautiful than our blue planet.”

After nine days in space, the Apollo spacecraft splashed down 330 miles northwest of Hawaii.

The Soyuz touched down in the Soviet Union’s Central Asia region.

The mission, known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, thrilled Americans and Russians alike.

The cosmonauts were greeted by Ford when they visited the White House on a nationwide tour, accompanied by the astronauts, and the U.S. spacemen toured the Soviet Union as guests of the cosmonauts.

Valery Nikolayevich Kubasov was born Jan. 7, 1935, in Vyazniki, Russia, about 180 miles northeast of Moscow.

His father was a mechanic, and Mr. Kubasov once said he grew up “in the world of nuts, bolts and wheels.”

He recalled that seeing Russian planes in the skies as a young man inspired him to study “the most advanced technology of the century.”

He graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1958, worked on space projects and became a cosmonaut in 1966.

On his first space mission, aboard Soyuz 6 in October 1969, he carried out the first vacuum welding in space, fusing different types of metals with an electric gun to set the stage for extensive welding work on future missions in zero gravity.

Mr. Kubasov’s third and final space mission came in spring 1980, when he joined with Bertalan Farkas, the first Hungarian in space, on a docking with the Soviet Union’s Salyut 6 orbiting station.