posted 10-28-2014 11:36 AM               

Space Cover 288: Soviet Space Mission TM-18 and the Mir Space Station

In his biography, We Have Capture, General Tom Stafford, relates a tale about his April 1975 visit to the Soviet Union. After stating that the Soviets were hesitant about allowing the American. Apollo Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) astronauts to fly from Vunkovo Airport on the outskirts of Moscow to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, he negotiated by telling them, that he had seen that land from photos taken by U.S. satellites, and would be happy to fly at night. That evening the American crew of Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand boarded a Tu-134 for a night flight to Baikonur.

In his book he goes on, "We landed in Tashkent late at night, then we were up an on our way to Bukhara the next morning. To get around we had our own fleet of three Yak-40 executive jets-assigned to us on Brezhnev's personal order, we were told. Each plane could carry about thirty passengers. Prime crews went in one, backup crews in another and support crew members in a third."

That paragraph helped me in understanding the tie-in of the covers shown herein for the TM-18 mission.

The first two of the three covers shown here (above) represent the fact that the Soviet crews and their back-up crews usually flew in two separate aircraft en route to Baikonur as late as January, 1994, a week before the launch of Soyuz TM-18. The prime crew of TM-18, Victor Afanasyev, Yuri Usachev and Valeri Polyakov have signed the top cover. Two different cancels from Gorodok, also known as Star City, located in the suburbs of Moscow, appear on the top of cover one, while a Baikonur cancel appears at the bottom. The extra signature could be that of the pilot of the Tupolev 154 aircraft that flew them to the launch site.

The second cover (above) shows the same cancels and bears the signatures of two back-up crew members, whose identities elude me, along with another signature thought to be the pilot of that carrier aircraft. Printed on the back of these two covers is a stamp-like image, shown here, (below) with the English text, "Post-office of the Pilot-Cosmonauts".

Afanasyev and Usachev spent 179 days on Mir. Dr. Polyakov returned to Earth on Soyuz-TM 20 in March 1995, after more than 420 days on Mir. His mission was to test the effects of a possible long duration flight to Mars and back. His record of time spent in space still stands.

The fourth image shown here (above) shows a flown-to-the Soviet Space Station, MIR, cover, cancelled on the docking date of 10 January 1994. All three rubber stamp strikes were done aboard the MIR, which is pictured in the cachet. In addition to the crew of TM-18, it also bears the signatures of Soyuz 17 Russian crew men, Vasili Tebyev and Alexander Serebrov who had been in space for 196 days. After the Soyuz TM-18 crew settled in, the Soyuz TM-17 separated from MIR. However they somehow collided with MIR as they departed, knocking out the primary antenna and cutting out communications between the Space Station and their ground control. An alternate antenna was set up for communications and no other serious damage was done to the MIR Space Station nor to the TM-17 capsule which safely returned to Earth.