Setting the record:
Fourteen months aboard Mir was dream mission for Polyakov By Loretta Hall “We can fly to Mars.” That was the first thing Valeri Polyakov said on March 22, 1995, after returning from a 437-day 18-hour stay aboard the Russian space station Mir. During those fourteen and a half months, he orbited the Earth 7,075 times and traveled nearly 187 million miles. After twenty years, it remains the longest continuous spaceflight of any individual. The idea behind that long mission was to simulate a trip to Mars. It was a trip he had waited thirty years for. Polyakov finished medical school in Moscow in 1965, just four years after his countryman Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned spaceflight. That flight and other Soviet and American orbital flights that followed inspired Polyakov to specialize in space medicine. In 1972, he began training to monitor other cosmonauts during their flights and to prepare for eventual spaceflights of his own. His first chance to live in space came in August 1988, when he flew to the Mir space station, which had been orbiting the Earth for over two years. He studied the effects of microgravity on himself and fellow cosmonauts during a 240-day mission. “I felt very good during the whole flight – on the [launch], during the time on the orbit, and during the landing,” Polyakov told an oral history interviewer in 1996. “It can be explained because I am a specialist in space medicine. I know how to use the methods of control, all of the things that protect you, how to use countermeasures the best.” In January 1994, Polyakov got his second chance to live in space aboard Mir. Originally planned for up to eighteen months, the mission length was shortened somewhat because of budget cuts and launch postponements due to rocket engine delivery delays. Until that time, the longest single mission had been 366 days 23 hours, accomplished by Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov in 1987-88. “My goal was to demonstrate the ability to work on Mars and come back in good health,” Polyakov said in a January 2001 National Geographic Valeri Polyakov watches from Mir as Space Shuttle Discovery practices an approach maneuver in February 1995. The photo was taken by Vladimir Titov aboard the Space Shuttle. Credit: NASA
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