It's been 30 years today since the first (and as of now the only one) space flight of a Polish cosmonaut, general Miroslaw Hermaszewski.
Hermaszewski began the preparations to the space fight in 1976. He was trained in the Star City, near Moscow, a soviet cosmonaut training centre. He embarked on his space flight on 27th June 1978 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, accompanied by a soviet cosmonaut Piotr Klimuk. He was 37 at that time and ranked a major. He landed on 5th July in Kazakhstan.
Hermaszewski spent 8 days in space and circled our planet 126 times. His spacecraft, Soyuz 30, docked to Salut 6 orbital space station, where Hermaszewski conducted a series of scientific experiments. The flight of the Polish cosmonaut was possible due to the Intercosmos project, which Poland joined in 1967.
Till this very day Hermaszewski holds a number of Polish records: the flight altitude (363 km), the flight length (190 hours 3 minutes and 4 seconds) and the flight distance covered (5,273,257 km).
Born on 15th September 1941 in Lipniki, in Volhynian Voivodship, Miroslaw Hermaszewski's first encounter with aviation was in 1960, when he performed his glider flights. In 1961 he was admitted to the Air Force Officer Training School in Deblin, where he became a fighter pilot (MIG-15). He later gained qualifications to fly supersonic planes (MIG-21).
During his military career he was a commander of a squadron in Slupsk, a second-in-command of a Regiment in Gdynia, a commander of the 11th Regiment of Fighters in Wroclaw. Following his space flight, he worked in the General Staff of the Polish Army, was a commander of the "School of Eaglets" in Deblin (1987-1990). In the 90s he fulfilled management positions in air forces.
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