On Aug. 26, 1978, cosmonaut and pilot Sigmund Jähn became the first German to fly in space.
Jähn was an experienced pilot for the East German Air Force and studied at the Gagarin Air Force Academy in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. In 1976, he and one other German pilot were selected for the Interkosmos program, which was designed to help the Soviet Union’s allies with space missions.
Jähn joined three Soviet cosmonauts on the Soyuz 31 mission to the Salyut 6 space station, where he took photos of the Earth using a new multispectral camera. He also conducted experiments in biology, physics and materials science. After almost 8 days in space, he safely returned to Earth.
Why it mattered
Jähn’s flight to the Soviet Union’s Salyut 6 station is one of the earliest examples of partner nations flying with an ally on a collaborative space mission. He flew just three years after the first-ever international space mission, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight between NASA and the Soviet Union.
Today, such missions are commonplace at the International Space Station, which has seen astronauts from many countries visit as part of missions by the five space agencies overseeing it (NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and Canadian Space Agency).
Jähn conducted 25 different experiments on his Soyuz 31 flight with cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky. Those experiments covered a range of topics, including geophysics, materials science, medicine, biology, and remote sensing, ESA has said.
After his spaceflight, Jähn led East Germany’s new Space Training Centre at Eggersdorf near Strausberg until 1990, when the East German Air Force was dissolved. He was discharged with the rank of major general.
But Jähn stayed involved in Germany’s space exploration efforts, serving as a freelance consultant for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, as well as for the European Astronaut Center in Cologne.
Jähn retired in 2002, but not before having the Asteroid 17737 named in his honor in 2001. Jähn died in 2019 at age 82.
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