Soyuz TM-7, launched days earlier, docked with the Mir space station carrying Soviet cosmonauts Alexander Volkov and Sergei Krikalev alongside French astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, who conducted a spacewalk and joint research during his stay. The mission underscored a surprising thread of Franco-Soviet space collaboration even as the wider Cold War ground on.
Jean-Loup Chrétien had already made history in 1982 as the first Western European to fly in space aboard a Soviet Soyuz, and his 1988 return to Mir made him the first non-Soviet, non-American to perform a spacewalk. During his time aboard Mir, he tested a French-built airlock component called Erable and conducted a spacewalk lasting nearly six hours.
The French-Soviet space partnership dated back to a 1966 cooperation agreement, remarkable given France's NATO membership, and reflected Charles de Gaulle's desire for an independent French foreign policy that hedged between American and Soviet blocs. Chrétien's missions offered the Soviets prestige and hard currency, and gave France a symbolic seat at the human spaceflight table without the vast expense of an independent program.
Chrétien returned to Earth after eleven days, having logged a combined total approaching a month in orbit across his two Soviet missions. His flights presaged the far broader international cooperation that would define the later Mir and International Space Station programs of the 1990s and 2000s.
Key people: Jean-Loup Chrétien