Museum-ship Cosmonaut Patsayev in Kaliningrad

The ship «Cosmonaut Victor Patsayev» is moored opposite the museum «Marine Königsberg-Kaliningrad». It is a very interesting museum devoted to the history of space science in the Soviet Union. 

The value of this museum ship is that there one can look at the Soviet ships, which were responsible for reception and analysis of telemetric data from spacecraft, as well as ensuring radio communication between space ships and the Mission Control Center.

As Korolev said: «Russia is great but we have not enough space». These words implied that in spite of the large territory of Russia it was impossible to provide adequate communication with spacecraft only with the help of ground communication towers. Therefore it was decided to create a fleet of ships, which were in different parts of world ocean and provided continuous communication both with manned space ships and satellites.

The ship was built at the Leningrad shipyard in 1968. Until 1994 it went on 14 expeditions and provided communication with many space ships. And even after the ship was moored at the Kaliningrad museum it continued to provide communication with spacecraft.

There is a large exposition devoted to manned flights and space research in several rooms of the ship. It tells in detail about the work of the ships of the sea «space» fleet in 70-90th of the past century, such as: Yuri Gagarin (the most powerful ship of the fleet), Vladimir Komarov, Vladislav Volkov, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Pavel Belyayev.

A separate exposition is devoted to a cosmonaut Victor Patsayev and his first tragic flight in 1971 when the decompression of the landing module of Soyuz-11 led to the death of Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Victor Patsayev as they were without spacesuits.