Vladimir Shatalov obituary
In 1941, the 13-year-old Vladimir Shatalov was working on the defences around Leningrad as the Soviet city faced annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. By 1969, from the Soviet base at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, he was soaring into orbit aboard the Soyuz 4 spacecraft. The world had turned.
The aim that day - 14 January 1969 - was to dock with Soyuz 5, and to transfer the flight engineer Aleksei Yeliseyev and research engineer Yevgeny Khrunovkrunov from Soyuz 5 into pilot cosmonaut Shatalov's ship. A connecting tunnel for the Soviet craft had not yet been developed, so the transfer of the two cosmonauts had to take place via a space walk. Even in the era of space pioneers this was a major first, which helped pave the way for the permanent space stations that were to follow.
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