Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 26, 1992 TAG: 9203260176
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times and The Washington Post
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
The Kazakhstan plains where he came down looked the same. But the Soviet state whose seal still decorated his spacesuit was gone, and his home city of Leningrad was off the maps.
The 33-year-old flight engineer's stint in space aboard the Mir space station originally had been scheduled to end last October. But because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and money problems in Moscow, he was asked to extend his space journey by almost five months - causing a predicament that made him something of a media celebrity.
While he was circling the Earth in the Mir space station, the Soviet Union fought off a coup, changed leaders and went out of existence.
Nicknamed the "space victim" and "the man who is sick of flying" by the media while he waited to be returned to Earth, Krikalev now is being called Russia's "Time Traveler" and being compared to science fiction characters who suddenly find themselves catapulted into a new century.
A few days before his return, however, he told a news conference from space that he did not anticipate a huge difference.
"I lived on the territory of Russia while the republics were united into the Soviet Union and I am moving back into Russia . . . so the change has not been so drastic," he said.
Looking woozy, Krikalev was given smelling salts after being lifted from the vehicle that carried him and two others to Earth.
Krikalev had rocketed into space on May 18, 1991, and spent 313 days there.
With him in the Soyuz-TM transport capsule were Aleksandr Volkov, who went up in October, and Klaus-Dietrich Flade, a German test pilot who went up last week for a series of experiments.
Memo: a longer version ran in the State edition.