Valery Kubasov

Kubasov died in Moscow of natural causes on 19 February 2014, at the age of 79. He is survived by his wife Lyudmila Kurovskaya, daughter Ekaterina and son Dmitry.

Kubasov was also involved in the development of the Mir space station. He retired from the Russian space program in November 1993 and was later deputy director of RKK Energia.

Kubasov, along with Slayton and Brand, won the Yuri Gagarin Gold Medal from FAI in 1976.

The July, 1975, Apollo–Soyuz Test Project became Kubasov's second space mission and he was a flight engineer on it. Kubasov spent several hours in the Apollo command and docking modules. During this project Kubasov told the U.S. President Gerald Ford in a TV linkup, that they got "good space food... some juice, some coffee and a lot of water".

In 1971 Kubasov was almost launched aboard the ill-fated Soyuz 11 mission, he was among the prime crew alongside Alexei Leonov. Medics from the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow found a swelling on Kubasov's right lung. Fearing the onset of tuberculosis, the entire Soyuz 11 prime crew was grounded and replaced by the backup: Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. In his memoir Two Sides of the Moon Leonov would later write: "It turned out later, that [Kubasov] was allergic to a chemical insecticide used to spray trees".

Kubasov's first space mission, the five-day Soyuz 6 flight in October 1969, was unsuccessful due to technical issues as space vehicles never met up. During Soyuz 6 mission Kubasov and Georgy Shonin performed the first welding experiment in space. The Vulcan furnace required internal hatches between the orbital and descent modules to be sealed, with the welding performed automatically, overseen by Kubasov. Samples of stainless steel and titanium were welded together, then cut, after which the hatches were opened for Kubasov to perform a hand-held welding. However, in 1990 it became known that Vulcan's low-pressure compressed arc had inadvertently targeted a beam at the orbital module wall. Upon opening the hatch, the cosmonauts discovered the damage and, fearing a depressurization, returned to the descent module.

In May 1964, while working for Korolev, Kubasov became one of a handful of civilian candidates who passed preliminary medical screening for one of the Soviet Voskhod missions. Two years later, after some relaxation of the existing rules, Kubasov along with Georgy Grechko and Vladislav Volkov, were officially accepted into the newly established civilian cosmonaut corps.

Valery Kubasov was born on January 7, 1935 in Vyazniki, Ivanovo Industrial Oblast, RSFSR, USSR. He was married to Lyudmila Kurovskaya.