Soviet cosmonaut, mission commander on the Soyuz 11 mission in which he, along with design engineer Viktor Ivanovich Patsayev (Patsayev, Viktor Ivanovich) and flight engineer Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov (Volkov, Vladislav Nikolayevich), remained in space a record 24 days. They created the first manned orbital scientific station by docking their Soyuz 11 spacecraft with the unmanned Salyut station launched two months earlier, but they were found dead in their space capsule after it made a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. Death was caused by decompression resulting from a leak in their capsule when a hatch was improperly closed. While in the space station, they had performed meteorologic and plant-growing experiments.