Valery Fedorovich Bykovsky
Aviation cosmonaut
Valery Fedorovich Bykovsky was born on 2 August 1934 in Pavlovsky Posad, Moscow Region.
After studying at the Kachinsk Military Aviation School and a career as a military pilot in the Soviet Air Force, he was accepted into the world's first cosmonaut group in 1960.
Valery Bykovsky completed his first space flight from 14 to 19 June 1963 on board "Vostok 5" together with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. He graduated from the Shukovsky Military Academy in 1968. He then prepared intensively for a moon landing, which was not carried out as the USSR cancelled the manned moon flight programme in 1970. In 1973, he wrote a dissertation on navigation problems on cosmic trajectories and was awarded the academic degree of "Candidate of Technical Sciences".
On 15 September 1976, Valery Bykovsky and Vladimir Aksyonov took off on their second space flight, during which the MKF-6 multispectral camera developed by Carl Zeiss Jena was tested.
His third flight around the earth began on 26 August 1978, during which he was accompanied by Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space, for a total of nine days in the "Salut 6" space station.
After his active time as a cosmonaut, he devoted himself primarily to cosmonaut training in the Star City.
With three space flights under his belt, Waleri Bykowski is one of the most experienced and successful cosmonauts/astronauts in the world. As president or honorary member of numerous organisations, he enjoys a high international reputation due to his extensive scientific life's work. He has been honoured with numerous awards for his outstanding achievements.
On the occasion of his joint space flight with Sigmund Jähn, Waleri Bykowski was made an honorary citizen of the city of Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz again) on 25 September 1978.
He died on 27 March 2019.