Setting the record:
Fourteen months
aboard Mir was
dream mission
for Polyakov
By Loretta Hall
“We can fly to Mars.”
That was the first thing Valeri Polyakov said on March 22, 1995, after returning from a 437-day 18-hour stay aboard the Russian space
station Mir. During those fourteen and a half months, he orbited the
Earth 7,075 times and traveled nearly 187 million miles. After twenty
years, it remains the longest continuous spaceflight of any individual.
The idea behind that long mission was to simulate a trip to Mars.
It was a trip he had waited thirty years for. Polyakov finished medical
school in Moscow in 1965, just four years after his countryman Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned spaceflight. That flight and other Soviet
and American orbital flights that followed inspired Polyakov to specialize in
space medicine. In 1972, he began training to monitor other cosmonauts
during their flights and to prepare for eventual spaceflights of his own.
His first chance to live in space came in August 1988, when he
flew to the Mir space station, which had been orbiting the Earth
for over two years. He studied the effects of microgravity on himself and fellow cosmonauts during a 240-day mission.
“I felt very good during the whole flight – on the [launch], during the
time on the orbit, and during the landing,” Polyakov told an oral history interviewer in 1996. “It can be explained because I am