User:WDGraham/Cancelled Soyuz missions

During the Soyuz programme a number of planned missions were cancelled at various stages of development. Since the Soviet space programme did not assign mission numbers until after launch, these missions are often referred to by the designations they were planned to have if they were flown. Many of these designations were later reused, so the letter "A" is sometimes added to the numbers of cancelled missions to distinguish them.

Soyuz 2

Soyuz 2 was intended to be the second mission of the Soyuz programme, launching on 24 April 1967; the day after Soyuz 1. Cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky, Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov would have flown the mission, which was intended to perform a passive docking with Soyuz 1. After docking, Yeliseyev and Khrunov would have performed an extra-vehicular activity to transfer between the spacecraft. After one of Soyuz 1's solar arrays failed to deploy, the Soyuz 2 EVA was modified to include an attempt to deploy it. The launch was scrubbed due to poor weather, and Soyuz 1 returned to Earth without competing the docking. Soyuz 1 crashed during landing after its parachute failed to deploy properly, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. After the accident, inspections conducted on the spacecraft which was to have been used for the Soyuz 2 mission showed that its would have also failed had it attempted to land. The Soyuz 5 mission flown in January 1969 completed the objectives of the original Soyuz 2 mission, with Soyuz 4 docking with it.

See also

• Canceled Apollo missions
• Cancelled Space Shuttle missions