The French Manned Space Programme

Spring was turning to summer on the Russian steppe, wild flowers punctuating the grey-green monotony of the wide horizon, as Soyuz T-6 roared into life on the pad at Baikonour cosmodrome, Kazakhstan and thundered skyward. The date was 24 June 1982. For the Soviet Union it was a relatively routine flight, just another in a long series of missions to orbiting Salyut space stations which had been gathering pace over the previous ten years. But for France it signalled its entry into the elite club of nations which had sent their citizens into space. Jean-Loup Chretien, a 43-year-old test pilot, was on board alongside two Soviet cosmonauts, mission commander Lt.-Col. Vladimir Alexandrovich Dzhanibekov, a veteran of two previous space flights, and flight engineer Alexander Sergeyevich Ivanchenkov. Chretien’s role was officially to perform scientific experiments. But it was also to notch up a prestigious landmark for the French space programme — becoming the first West European astronaut in space, and in the process beating into orbit West German Ulf Merbold, who was at that time undergoing training in the US for a Spacelab flight aboard the shuttle under the auspices of the European Space Agency.