Jähn Sigmund (born 13 from February of 1937 , Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, Germany, died on 21 September of the 2019 , Strausberg), East German cosmonaut who became the first German in space.
Summary
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- 1 Biography
- 2 Return to Earth and ESA
- 3 Awards and honors
- 4 Sources
Biography
Sigmund Jähn was born into a very humble family in 1937, during the Nazi regime. He attended school in his hometown until 1951. As a young man, Jähn trained to become a printer, but in 1955 he joined the East German Air Force, where he became a pilot and military scientist. In 1966 he left East Germany to study at the Gagarin Military Air Academy in the Soviet Union. Upon completion of his studies, he worked in pilot education and flight safety and applied his fluency in Russian to translate a series of Soviet military and political publications into German.
In 1976 Jähn was selected to train as the first cosmonaut in the Soviet Intercosmos program. This program placed non-Soviet cosmonauts on routine flights with experienced Soviet cosmonauts in a campaign to demonstrate Soviet solidarity with the Warsaw Pact states and other sympathetic countries. On August 26, 1978, Jähn took off with Soviet cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky aboard Soyuz 31. On the Salyut space station, he conducted scientific experiments before returning to Earth on Soyuz 29 on September 3, 1978. Awarded 1978 Hero of the German Democratic Republic, and automatically obtained the medal of the Order of Karl Marx.
After the Intercosmos mission, Jähn was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and received the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian honor of the Soviet Union. His home country, East Germany, elevated him to something of a socialist folk hero and proudly proclaimed that the first German in space had not been a West German citizen but an East German citizen. In 1983 Jähn obtained a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Central Institute for Earth Physics in Potsdam. After the reunification of Germany, he represented the country and the European Space Agency as a consultant at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia .
Return to Earth and ESA
After his space flight, Jähn became head of the newly created Air Force Space Training Center at Eggersdorf near Strausberg, holding this position until the reunification of Germany. The 2 of October of 1990 , the Air Force East Germany was dissolved and Jähn was discharged with the rank of major general. He then worked as an independent consultant for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, and since 1993 also for ESA on behalf of the European Astronaut Center in Cologne. Here he supervised German and European astronauts during the preparations for the missions Mir-92 (Klaus-Dietrich Flade and Reinhold Ewald), Euromir-94 ( Ulf Merbold and Pedro Duque), Euromir-96 (Thomas Reiter and Christer Fuglesang) and Mir -97 (Reinhold Ewald and Hans Schlegel).
Jähn worked as an ESA consultant in Star City until his retirement in 2002. Since then, he has remained a tireless advocate for space, attending events and participating in conferences and forums across Europe. He also played a key role in the creation of the International Association of Space Explorers (ASE). As a founding member in 1985, he was a member of its executive committee for several years. Asteroid 17737 was named in his honor in 2001.
