Mirosław Hermaszewski

Mirosław Hermaszewski (; 15 September 1941 – 12 December 2022) was a Polish cosmonaut, fighter plane pilot, and Polish Air Force officer. He became the first, and at the time of his death in December 2022, the only, Polish national in space when he flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz 30 spacecraft in 1978. He was the 89th human to reach outer space.

Early life and education

Mirosław Hermaszewski was born on 15 September 1941 into a Polish family in Lipniki, formerly in the Wołyń Voivodeship of Poland, but at the time part of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and since the end of the Second World War located in Ukraine. The youngest of Roman Hermaszewski and Kamila Bielawska's seven children, Mirosław was a survivor of the Volhynian slaughter during which Ukrainian nationalists murdered 19 members of his family, including his father. Hermaszewski narrowly escaped death himself when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army attacked Lipniki on the night of 26–27 March 1943. At the time of the massacre, Hermaszewski was only 18 months old; the youngest victim from his family was 1½ years old, while the oldest—Hermaszewski's grandfather—was 90.

Although he has since highlighted the need to depart from nationalist sentiments and to accept responsibility for the genocide, Hermaszewski also condemned discrimination of the Ukrainian nation as a whole based on the actions of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Ukrainian villagers who aided them in the murders. In an April 2015 interview with NaTemat.pl about the massacres, he was quoted as saying:

Hermaszewski pointed out that after his mother barely escaped with her life from Lipniki, it was Ukrainian women from a neighbouring village who were acquainted with her that had given her shelter and looked after her during the ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews from the region. He also recalled how his mother told him of many Ukrainians that took Poles in and cared for them during this period.

After the incorporation of former Polish territory into the Ukrainian SSR at the end of the war, those of Hermaszewski's family who survived were forcibly deported to Wołów near Wrocław, where he completed elementary and high school. From a young age he was interested in aviation, being a skillful self-taught modeller. In 1960, he completed a gliding pilotage course in the Wrocław Aeroklub. He flew at the airports in Oleśnica, Jeżów Sudecki, on the Żar mountain, and in Lisie Kąty.

Military career

Hermaszewski finished his airplane pilotage course in Grudziądz in 1961, and in autumn of the same year started studying to be a fighter plane pilot at the "School of Eaglets" in Dęblin. There he mastered the TS-8 Bies trainer aircraft and then earned permission to fly the MiG-15 jet fighter. After graduating from the academy in March 1964 at the top of his class, he was assigned to the air defence regiment in Poznań with the rank of ''podporucznik'' and continued to study at the General Staff Academy in Warsaw; he learned to fly the MiG-21. In the years that followed, he continued to train while serving the Polish Air Force as the commander of squadrons and regiments in Słupsk, Gdynia, and Wrocław. In 1971, he graduated from the Karol Świerczewski Military Academy.

Over the course of his military career, Hermaszewski piloted gliders and training aircraft such as the aforementioned TS-8 Bies, the CSS-13, the TS-11 Iskra, and the PZL-130 Orlik, various piston engine airplanes like the Yak-18, as well as a plethora of jets – such as the MiG-15, MiG-17, Polish derivatives of the latter, several versions of the MiG-21, the F-16, F-18, Mirage 2000-5, the Su-27, MiG-29, and others.

Interkosmos programme

In 1976, he was chosen from a pool of 500 Polish military pilots to take part in the Interkosmos space programme. The group of candidates, who initially were not informed about what they were being selected and psychologically tested for, was narrowed down to 120, then just five, and eventually from an elite selection of only several pilots Hermaszewski was finally picked with Zenon Jankowski as his backup to participate in the Soyuz 30 mission. For a period of almost two years, they underwent extensive training for theoretical expertise, physical endurance, and resistance to mental stress (among various other factors) at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, near Moscow. Besides training in weightless conditions, psychological trials took place as well with candidates at one point having to complete 998 tests in one day.

In late June 1978, together with Soviet cosmonaut Pyotr Klimuk from Belarus, Hermaszewski flew from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to spend eight days aboard the Salyut 6 space station (from 17:27 on 27 June to 16:31 on 5 July 1978). The latter fulfilled the role of deck engineer, while the former (having performed two space missions up to this point) served as commander. Minutes before the launch of their spacecraft, Hermaszewski said:

During their time in orbit, Klimuk and Hermaszewski carried out various geoscience experiments and photographed the Earth – orbiting it 126 times. Over the duration of their stay at the space station, Hermaszewski and Klimuk—sometimes with the aid of Vladimir Kovalyonok and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov, the two other cosmonauts who had already been stationed at Salyut 6 prior to the arrival of the Soyuz 30 mission—carried out a total of eleven different experiments while in space that had been planned internationally as part of the programme.

They landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan, 300 km west of Tselinograd. After the spaceflight, Hermaszewski achieved hero status in the countries of the Eastern Bloc (especially the Polish People's Republic) and was awarded several high honours, including the rarely-given-to-foreigners Hero of the Soviet Union title for his participation in the mission. A massive information and propaganda campaign around the Soyuz 30 mission and its participants was launched by the Polish government in coordination with the USSR and other allied states in the Warsaw Pact. In 1985, he co-founded the Association of Space Explorers. Hermaszewski later became President of the Polish Astronautical Society (a position he held from 1986 to 1990).

Later career

When martial law in Poland was introduced on 13 December 1981, Hermaszewski was named as a member of the Military Council of National Salvation (WRON) without his consent or knowledge. He was studying in Moscow at the time and was at first ordered to return to Warsaw when martial law was declared, but after two weeks he was released to continue his studies. In 1982 he advanced to ''pułkownik'' military rank. Over a year after the end of martial law in the Polish People's Republic, in November 1984, Hermaszewski was appointed commander of the Fighter Pilots School in Dęblin. By 1987, he became head of that institution and his time as director has since then been assessed very positively, as his superiors noted the progress in team integration, as well as an increase in the didactic and educational level at the university.

In 1988, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and continued to serve in high-ranking positions for the training of new combat pilots. Between 1991 and 1992, Hermaszewski served as second-in-command of the Polish Air Force and Air Defence. He performed his final flight in a MiG-29, in October 2005, and after that retired; in his 40 years of service for the Polish Air Force, he spent 2047 hours in the air.

Following retirement from the military, he unsuccessfully stood in 2001 Polish parliamentary elections as an SLD-UP candidate to the ''Senat''. He received 93,783 votes, which translated to 32.46% of the vote in his electoral region. In the 2002 Polish local elections, again as a candidate of the social-democratic SLD-UP party, he was elected into the Mazovian Regional Assembly with 10,463 votes. He then became a member of the SLD party and ran once again in Polish parliamentary elections in 2005, with 5,223 votes but no mandate. In 2009, Universitas published his autobiographical story ''Ciężar nieważkości. Opowieść pilota-kosmonauty'' ("The Weight of Weightlessness. Story of a Pilot-Cosmonaut") to positive reception from readers, leading to reprints and several expanded versions being published in the decade that followed.

Hermaszewski was set to try his hand at politics once more as a candidate for the European Parliament, again from the SLD party, in the 2014 elections. Ultimately he decided not to take part, as his son-in-law was also running for office but via an opposing political party. In 2018, the conservative ruling Law and Justice party of Poland—mirroring similar efforts from 2007—tried to vote through a law that would collectively demote all former members of the aforementioned WRON from the early 1980s to the lowest rank of private, including Hermaszewski. The so-called "degradation act" was met with controversy in Polish and foreign media primarily due to the case of Hermaszewski, who was initially included as a member of the WRON without his consent or knowledge. In the end, the proposed law was vetoed by President Andrzej Duda, who used Hermaszewski's case as one of the reasons why the "degradation act" needs to be rewritten.

Personal life

Hermaszewski was interested in aviation and model aircraft from an early age. He was married to Emilia (née Łazar) Hermaszewska from 1966 until his death; together they had two children, Mirosław (born 1966) and Emilia (born 1974). They also had four grandchildren: Julia, Amelia, Emilia, and Stanisław as well as a pet Yorkshire Terrier

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