Cosmonauts Build Structure in Space

The world’s two most experienced spacemen spent almost four hours outside their Salyut 7 orbiting station Wednesday to conduct construction experiments, the official news agency Tass said.

Cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovev, who spent 237 days aloft and took six space walks during a 1984 mission, spent 3 hours and 50 minutes building a platform and putting together a 50-foot-tall prefabricated structure on top of it.

Tass called the space walk a unique experiment and quoted mission control center as saying that it “ushers in a new stage in the work in orbit and opens (up) the possibility of large-scale assembly work in outer space.”

Soviet television carried a live broadcast of the space walk. In line with the greater openness of the Soviet space program this year, official newspapers announced the telecast in advance. The start of the cosmonauts’ mission on March 13 also was broadcast live.

The agency said the two cosmonauts first erected a platform on a transfer compartment of the Salyut 7, a space station launched in 1982 that currently has a Cosmos 1686 cargo ship and a Soyuz T-15 spacecraft attached to it.

Kizim and Solovev were launched into space March 13 aboard the Soyuz T-15, going first to the Soviets’ new Mir space station, launched in February. They reboarded the Soyuz T-15 on May 5 and flew to the Salyut 7.