Soviet Soyuz Programme: Soyuz 13, crewed by cosmonauts Valentin Lebedev and Pyotr Klimuk, is launched from Baikonur in the Soviet Union.
Pyotr Ilyich Klimuk (Belarusian: ; Russian: ; born 10 July 1942) is a former Soviet cosmonaut and the first Belarusian to perform space travel. Klimuk made three flights into space.
Klimuk attended the Leninski Komsomol Chernigov High Aviation School and entered the Soviet Air Force in 1964. The following year, he was selected to join the space programme.
His first flight was a long test flight on Soyuz 13 in 1973. This was followed by a mission to the Salyut 4 space station on Soyuz 18 in 1975.
From 1976 he became involved in the Intercosmos and made his third and final spaceflight on an Intercosmos flight with Polish cosmonaut Mirosaw Hermaszewski on Soyuz 30 in 1978.He resigned from the cosmonaut team in 1978 to take up a position as the Assistant to the Chief of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. In 1991 he was promoted to Chief of that facility and remained in that post until retirement in 2003.
Klimuk is a graduate of the Gagarin Air Force Academy and the Lenin Military-Political Academy.
He is the author of two books on human spaceflight: Beside the Stars, and Attack on Weightlessness.
The Soyuz programme ( SOY-yooz, SAW-; Russian: Союз [sɐˈjus], meaning "Union") is a human spaceflight programme initiated by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The Soyuz spacecraft was originally part of a Moon landing project intended to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon. It was the third Soviet human spaceflight programme after the Vostok (1961–1963) and Voskhod (1964–1965) programmes.The programme consists of the Soyuz capsule and the Soyuz rocket and is now the responsibility of the Russian Roscosmos. After the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, Soyuz was the only way for humans to get to the International Space Station (ISS) until 30 May 2020, when Crew Dragon flew to the ISS for the first time with astronauts.