Soyuz TM-11 was the eleventh expedition to the Russian

Space Station A space station is a spacecraft capable of supporting a human crew in orbit for an extended period of time, and is therefore a type of space habitat. It lacks major propulsion or landing systems. An orbital station or an orbital space station i ...

Mir, using a

Soyuz-TM The Soyuz-TM were fourth generation (1986–2002) Soyuz spacecraft used for ferry flights to the Mir and International Space Station, ISS space stations. The Soyuz spacecraft consisted of three parts, the Orbital Module, the Descent Module and th ...

crew transport vessel. The mission notably carried a Japanese television reporter from

Tokyo Broadcasting System formerly is a Japanese media and licensed broadcasting holding company. It is the parent company of the television network and radio network . It has a 28-affiliate television network called JNN (Japan News Network), as well as a 34-affili ...

.The mission report is available here: http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/soyuz-tm11.htm

Crew

Mission highlights

Soyuz TM-11 was the 11th expedition to Mir, which spent 175 days docked to the space station. Coincidentally it was launched on the same day as

STS-35 STS-35 was the tenth flight of Space Shuttle ''Columbia'', the 38th shuttle flight, and a mission devoted to astronomical observations with ASTRO-1, a Spacelab observatory consisting of four telescopes. The mission launched from Kennedy Spac ...

. As the mission carried Toyohiro Akiyama, a reporter for the Japanese television network

, the spacecraft's launch shroud and its Soyuz booster were painted with the Japanese flag and advertisements for

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

, Unicharm, and Otsuka Pharmaceutical. A camera inside the descent module filmed the cosmonauts during ascent for Akiyama's network. Viktor Afanaseyev, Musa Manarov (on his second Mir visit), and Toyohiro Akiyama were welcomed aboard Mir by Soviet cosmonauts. Akiyama's network paid for the flight. The Soviets called this their first commercial spaceflight and claimed to have earned $14 million. The journalist was scheduled to make one 10-min TV broadcast and two 20-min radio broadcasts each day. Electrical power and video and TV system incompatibilities forced the Japanese to make extensive use of converters. His equipment, which weighed about 170 kg, was delivered by Progress-M spacecraft and set up in advance by Manakov and Strekalov. On December 5 Akiyama's couch was transferred to Soyuz-TM 10. On December 8 Manakov and Strekalov commenced loading Soyuz-TM 10's descent module with film and experiment results. TBS broadcast Akiyama's landing live from Kazakhstan.

References

{{Orbital launches in 1990 1990 in the Soviet Union Japan–Soviet Union relations Crewed Soyuz missions Space programme of the United Kingdom Spacecraft launched in 1990