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Soyuz-23 ordeal

In October 1976, a pair of Soviet cosmonauts failed to reach their space station and instead headed to a night touchdown in the midst of a severe snowstorm. They ended up in a half-frozen lake with a sunken exit hatch and blocked breathing nozzles, as rescue helicopters faced severe wind gusts and near-zero visibility on the approach to the location of the first Soviet water landing.

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Zudov (left) and Rozhdestvensky inside a Soyuz simulator at the Cosmonaut Training Center, TsPK

Soyuz-23 mission at a glance:

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Preparations for flight

The emergency return of the first expedition from the Almaz OPS-3 space station (publicly known as Salyut-5) prompted major revisions in the program of the second crew.

Due to lingering concerns about the possible toxicity of the station's interior, which was suspected of having potentially poisoned the first crew (INSIDER CONTENT), the fresh team of cosmonauts had to perform a thorough chemical analysis of the station's atmosphere.

At the time of the first OPS-3 crew landing in August 1976, four more pairs of cosmonauts were in training within the Almaz program, comprising two primary and two back-up crews:

• Vyacheslav Zudov and Valery Rozhdestvensky;
• Viktor Gorbatko and Yuri Glazkov;
• Vladimir Kazelsky and Vladimir Preobrazhensky;
• Anatoly Berezovoi and Mikhail Lisun.

To deal with the possible toxicity, the cosmonauts were trained to operate a special chemical analysis kit for testing onboard air during what was expected to be just a two-week stay. In case of contaminant detection, the cosmonauts were instructed to don gas masks. In addition, the operation of onboard air replacement was planned, which called for the manual release of onboard air and the station's re-pressurization with an additional supply. In parallel, the crew was still expected to perform observations and remote-sensing imaging for the Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences. (231)

Soyuz-23 lifts off

In mid-October 1976, an unseasonably severe cold and snow came to the launch site in Tyuratam. Snowstorms gripped the region but fortunately eased up just on time for launch on October 14, before restarting again. As usual on the eve of a crew launch, multiple search and rescue teams began deploying at the launch site in Tyuratam, as well as in Karaganda, Kustanai and other key locations along the mission's ascent path.

According to Iosif Davydov, a veteran of the Soviet rescue service, on the launch day, rocket fueling crews were late delivering propellant components to the pad, which forced a re-schedule of the liftoff and shifting the fueling of the booster when the crew was already aboard the vehicle. (245) The claim about the delay is doubtful, given the instantaneous window required for the rendezvous with the station, but pushing back the fueling operations to overlap with the crew boarding seems to be an appropriate move for catching up with the schedule.

Around an hour before launch, the winds picked up again and once the access gantry had retracted, officials were concerned that strong gusts shaking the rocket could trigger the emergency escape rockets. Still, the mission proceeded with an on-time launch.

The Soyuz spacecraft 11F615A9 No. 65 lifted off from Site 1 in Tyuratam on Oct. 14, 1976, at 20:39:18 Moscow Time. The primary crew members, including Commander Vyacheslav Zudov and Flight Engineer Valery Rozhdestvensky, were onboard, using the call sign Rodon.

Less than 10 minutes later, the spacecraft reached orbit and was publicly announced as Soyuz-23.

After a day of maneuvers, the ship reached the vicinity of the station, where the Igla radio system aboard Soyuz-23 could establish a direct link with its counterpart hardware on OPS-3 and begin the automated rendezvous process with the station.

However, well into the automated flight mode, the Igla failed to maintain necessary parameters. As the spacecraft was in the lateral motion compensation mode, the rendezvous system experienced severe signal fluctuations. The flight control system, which erroneously interpreted the position of the ship as deviating from its nominal trajectory, continuously fired the attitude control thrusters leading to heavy propellant consumption and even more severe misalignment of the two vehicles.

According to Boris Chertok, who was in charge of flight control avionics at NPO Energia, the crew did not react timely to the abnormal motion of their ship and to the excessive propellant consumption. In the meantime, the controllers on the ground realized that the Igla had been experiencing an anomaly in measuring angular velocity relative to its line of sight. (231)

Despite bringing the spacecraft within view of the station, mission control concluded that the remaining distance was still been too great for the transition to the final approach under the manual control, which had a high potential for crew errors, given the continuous misbehavior of the Igla system. Instead, the mission leaders made the decision to terminate the flight.

The crew was instructed not to switch to manual flight mode and prepare for landing.

Unexpected landing

To put the Descent Module into one of the nominal landing zones in Kazakhstan during daylight hours, Soyuz-23 would have to spend around seven days in orbit, which was out of the question with just three days-worth of critical resources onboard. Instead, the ship would have to go down during the crew's third work day, putting the Descent Module in a landing zone near the town of Arkalyk in the middle of the night, local time. The situation was further complicated by the raging snowstorm, and the weather apparently further worsened around two hours before landing, with the temperature in the landing zone falling to minus 20C degrees.

According to the standard landing routine, on the word from mission control that Soyuz had initiated the braking maneuver over the South Atlantic, the search and rescue aircraft took off from an airfield in Arkalyk and headed into the landing zone. However, around 15 minutes into the flight, the search and rescue team got a word that the capsule would overfly its original landing point by 121 kilometer. That unexpected shift made it impossible for the aircraft to reach the landing site at the time of a touchdown.

As forward helicopters were heading toward the predicted landing area, they encountered increasingly bad visibility due to heavy snow. The severe glare forced Davydov's helicopter to switch off onboard lights, relying only on instruments and on the guidance info from the fixed-wing aircraft. (245)

Similarly, the cosmonauts inside the capsule could see little behind their windows during their final descent under parachute. As Zudov later remembered, the touchdown felt strange and the subsequent rocking of the capsule hinted that they were on water, though with no understanding of their whereabouts at the time. The nominal cutoff of the main parachute was then followed by the unexpected release of the back-up parachute, later determined have been caused by salty water short-circuiting its activation sensors. Instead of separating as planned, the back-up parachute slowly sank into the slushy water and overturned the capsule, leaving the cosmonauts strapped upside down in their seats.

Without any communications with ground control or rescue services (due to antennas ending up underwater), Zudov and Rozhdestvensky unbuckled, but egress from the capsule was out of the question, because the top hatch, which was their only way out, was now almost completely underwater. They had no choice but to wait for help from the outside, while their capsule, initially hot from reentry, began slowly cool in the half-frozen water. (231)

Rescue operation

In the meantime, a navigator aboard one of the helicopters of the Arkalyk-based rescue team led by Iosif Davydov reported that its radio-compass had picked up a signal from the radio-beacon aboard Soyuz-23. The helicopter was already homing in on the target when the navigator suddenly announced to the rescuers onboard that they were approaching Lake Tengiz and that it appeared that the spacecraft had splashed down. Minutes later, Zudov's voice broke through into their headphones, confirming that the spacecraft was in the water. On instructions from Davydov, the chief pilot Lt. Colonel Bogatyrev told the crew to prepare for exiting the capsule and assured them that help was on the way. However, still struggling with heavy snow, the helicopter missed the landing site and only discovered it as the capsule's radio beacon started fading.

To make matters much worse, the rescuers discovered that they had no required floating gear onboard. In the rush to support the unscheduled landing, they had left inflatable boats behind. Most wet suits were also left in Arkalyk.

As Davydov remembered, the head of operational tactical team, Lt. Colonel Silaev looked at everybody with barely concealed panic.

On the second attempt to approach the capsule, the rescuers finally saw its light beacon, but the moment the pilot activated the search light, the white screen of falling snow blocked the view. Bogatyrev turned the light off and tried to hover over the barely visible beacon but without much success, as Davydov was waiting fruitlessly at the open hatch on the winch, ready to jump. After several failed attempts to approach the spacecraft, Bogatyrev had to turn to the shore, because they were running out of gas. By that time, several more helicopters appeared at the scene, but all they could do was circling over the capsule, as the raging storm and constant wind gusts left no chance for a stable hover.

Bogatyrev landed not far from the shore with nearly empty tanks and as the team was setting up an improvised camp, they were joined by other helicopters running out of fuel one after another. The majority of the rescue personnel had nothing else to do but start multiple fires using some tires found on the shore, which sent the stench of burned rubber into the air.

The swampy shores of the lake also prevented the amphibious vehicles arriving to the scene from reaching the capsule.

At least one helicopter had inflatable boats onboard and three boats with rescuers headed from the shore toward the spacecraft some two kilometers away. Two of them became stuck in the slush, but one boat, with the helicopter captain Nikolai Chernavsky, made it all the way to the spacecraft.

However, Chernavsky could do little but provide moral support to the crew by knocking on the wall of the capsule. The openings for air access into the spacecraft were forced underwater by the sunken back-up parachute, while the oxygen-generating system in the Soyuz was in its last throws and almost stopped producing oxygen. After two hours in such conditions, the cosmonauts showed the first signs of carbon dioxide poisoning. In their communications with the cosmonauts, rescuers heard heavy breathing and barely recognized their voices. Still, Zudov reported that they had changed into the wet suits and were ready to exit the capsule, but rescuers understood that this was impossible. With two thirds of the entrance hatch underwater, the craft would be immediately flooded and sink well before any extraction could be attempted.

Fortunately, with the morning approaching, the snowstorm began subsiding and the skies cleared, though temperature fell to minus 22 degrees. By that time, Rozhdestvensky, himself barely speaking, reported that Zudov had already lost consciousness due to lack of air. Moreover, captain Chernavsky, who kept his vigil by the capsule, was also freezing. By dawn, any communications with the crew had ceased, because the ice-covered antenna had also ended up submerged. On the ground, those familiar with the situation were fearing the worst.

The rescue

Before morning, a Mi-8 helicopter piloted by Nikolai Kondratiev and Oleg Nefedov reached Tengiz Lake after a long flight from Karaganda. It made a short landing at the shore camp, where it picked up Davydov, as one of the most experienced rescuers and then headed into the lake. Now, it was possible to safely hover over the capsule. The crew lowered a frogman, wearing only a light diving suit, into the water, who confirmed what had already been clear — it was not possible to access the submerged latches of the entrance hatch. However, knocks from the inside confirmed that the cosmonauts were still alive.

After some hot debates and hesitation, the rescuers proceeded with plan B, which would never be allowed under formal safety guidelines: the helicopter lowered a line into the water, and, after several failed attempts, divers succeeded in securing it to one of the lines of the backup parachute. The helicopter then began a slow tug, risking blowing the hatch of the capsule open by a surging water pressure. In addition, the slow flight at a speed of around just seven kilometers per hour with a heavy cargo could cause a helicopter to crash due to the engine overheating. The regular air-lifting of the capsule with an attached water-laden parachute was impossible due to the limits of the chopper's capacity.

For the first few hundred meters, the capsule was shedding ice and slush, and at one point, the parachute, which emerged from the water, suddenly inflated and violently shook the helicopter. Fortunately, Kondratiev was able to keep the aircraft under control.

After finally reaching the shore, Kondratiev carefully set the capsule on the ground and after disengaging the tether successfully landed the helicopter 50 meters away from the spacecraft.

Both cosmonauts were finally freed from their trap around 11 hours after their splashdown, which was determined have taken place on Oct. 16, 1976, at 20:45:53 Moscow Time, some 195 kilometers southwest of Tselinograd in the Lake Tengiz.

The cosmonauts were exhausted, half frozen but alive. They were even be able to pose in front of their spacecraft for photos intended to illustrate the upcoming official announcements about another "successful landing" of a Soviet spacecraft.

Aftermath

Not surprisingly, the nearly disastrous Soyuz-23 mission triggered some significant soul-searching within different institutions of the Soviet space program. First of all, another Igla failure raised new questions about the reliability of the automated rendezvous system. As a direct fallout from this latest incident during the Soyuz-23 mission, Armen Mnatsakanyan, Chief Designer of the Igla system at the NIITP avionics conglomerate, was shown the door on Jan. 6, 1977. At the same time, the inaction of the Soyuz-23 crew apparently was found to have exacerbated the situation and, possibly, prevented the second docking attempt under manual control, which could have saved the mission. Notably, neither Zudov nor Rozhdestvensky would ever get space crew assignments again. Ironically, Rozhdestvensky who was the only professional frogman in the Soviet cosmonaut group, ended up being an accidental participant in the first and only Soviet water landing.

However, the biggest questions hanged over the Soviet Search and Rescue Service, PSS, which had demonstrated a combination of dysfunction, low preparedness and inadequate technical capabilities in dealing with non-nominal situations, not withstanding the clear heroism of some of its rank-and-file members. According to Davydov, the Soviet Air Force, which oversaw PSS, had the reputation of its leadership on the line and, therefore, officially concluded that its members had acted correctly under the circumstances. In the aftermath of the incident, the Air Force Commander Marshall Kutakhov oversaw a major exercise of the PSS service at the home airfield in Chkalovsky, northeast of Moscow, and at a near-by Medvezhi Lake intended to demonstrate the "lessons learned" from the Soyuz-23 landing. However, Davydov claimed that the exercise had devolved into a fake simulation of the successful recovery actions, which had little in common with the situation at Lake Tengiz.

After some wrangling over the personal responsibilities of individual PSS members for the failures during the Soyuz-23 mission, including Davydov's apparent egregious error of leaving behind floating devices during a flight to the landing site, the Cosmonaut Training Center, TsPK, (also under Air Force management at the time) established a separate group of 11 specialists specifically responsible for testing emergency evacuation measures and safety gear and for training cosmonauts in extreme landing environments. (245)

The article by Anatoly Zak; last update: October 14, 2026

Page editor: Alain Chabot; last edit: October 14, 2026

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Rozhdestvensky (left) and Zudov during preparation for the Soyuz-23 mission at the Cosmonaut Training Center. Click to enlarge.

Zudov (lleft) and Rozhdestvensky during water landing training.

Zudov during water landing training ahead of the Soyuz-23 mission. Click to enlarge.

Rozhdestvensky during water landing training ahead of the Soyuz-23 mission. Click to enlarge.

Soyuz-23 on the launch pad in Tyuratam. Credit: Albert Pushkarev / TASS

The Descent Module of Soyuz-23 in the waters of Lake Tengiz in the lights of the recovery helicopter. Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

The Descent Module of the Soyuz-23 spacecraft (top left) emerges from the waters of Lake Tengiz trailed by a back-up parachute. Click to enlarge.

A rescue helicopter pulls the Descent Module of the Soyuz-23 spacecraft onto the shore of Lake Tengiz on the morning of Oct. 17, 1976. Click to enlarge.

Rescue personnel heads to the Descent Module of the Soyuz-23 spacecraft shortly after its delivery to the shore by a helicopter (right). Click to enlarge.

Rozhdestvensky and Zudov by their Descent Module shortly after their extraction from the capsule at the shore of Lake Tengiz. Click to enlarge.

Zudov (left) and Rozhdestvensky aboard an aircraft on their way back from the landing site. Click to enlarge.