On this day in space: Jan. 16, 1969: 1st docking of 2 crewed spacecraft

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On January 16, 1969, two crewed spacecraft docked in orbit for the first time.

On January 16, 1969, two crewed spacecraft docked in orbit for the first time.

An artist's illustration of the first-ever docking of two crewed spacecraft during the Soviet Union's Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 missions on Jan. 16, 1969. (Image credit: Lunokhod 2 CC BY-SA 3.0)

During reentry, the service module failed to separate from the descent module, and the spacecraft got turned upside-down. To top it off, the parachutes and soft-landing rockets failed. That cosmonaut, Boris Volynov, miraculously survived the crash — but he did lose a few teeth.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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