Soviet Soyuz 4 and 5 perform the first crewed spacecraft docking
On this day · 16 January 1969
Two Soviet capsules latched together in orbit, and cosmonauts crossed between them the only way they could: a spacewalk.
On January 16, 1969, the Soviet capsules Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 linked up in orbit, the first docking of two crewed spacecraft. Vladimir Shatalov flew Soyuz 4 alone; Soyuz 5 carried commander Boris Volynov with flight engineers Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov.
There was a catch. The docking hardware joined the two ships mechanically but left no internal passage between them. So Yeliseyev and Khrunov pulled on their Yastreb (“hawk”) pressure suits, opened the hatch, and hauled themselves hand over hand across the outside of the docked vehicles, the first time anyone returned to Earth in a different ship than the one they launched in.
The linked craft were hailed in Soviet announcements as the world’s first space station.
The spacewalkers spent about 37 minutes outside before climbing into Soyuz 4. The ships stayed joined for roughly 4 hours and 35 minutes, then parted. The clumsy external transfer pointed straight toward the docking tunnels that space stations would later depend on.
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