“Leonov Immediately Found the Right Language to Communicate with Americans” (interview)

For participation in the joint flight under the EPAS program, the USSR and the USA determined the prime and backup crews for their spacecraft. Due to the fact that the Soviet Union was preparing two spacecraft for the flight, four crews were assigned to them respectively: A.A. Leonov – V.N. Kubasov, A.V. Filipchenko – N.N. Rukavishnikov, V.A. Dzhanibekov – B.D. Andreyev, Yu.V. Romanenko – A.S. Ivanchenkov. Members of the third and fourth crews had no experience of space flights and were training as backups. Cosmonauts A.V. Filipchenko and N.N. Rukavishnikov in December 1974 on the Soyuz-16 spacecraft performed a large volume of work testing and refining new systems, modes, and components of the Soyuz spacecraft in connection with the EPAS program. Under conditions maximally approximating the upcoming docking with Apollo, in manual and automatic control modes, the new androgynous peripheral docking assembly installed on Soyuz-16 was tested. The historic docking of Soyuz with Apollo was carried out in July 1975 by A.A. Leonov and V.N. Kubasov. The direct participants of these flights have already passed away. But it seemed interesting to us to look at the flight and preparation for it through the eyes of a novice cosmonaut, and we turned to Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dzhanibekov, then a Major, pilot-instructor, enrolled in the cosmonaut corps in 1970. Today, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Major-General of Aviation V.A. Dzhanibekov is a most experienced cosmonaut who performed five space flights, among them the expedition that made him famous to the "dead" Salyut-7 station, which was in an uncontrolled mode, whose functionality they restored together with flight engineer Viktor Petrovich Savinykh, now an Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.