Today we mark 41 years since the flight of the first Bulgarian cosmonaut in space. On April 10, 1979, the spacecraft “Soyuz 33” took off at 8.34 pm Moscow time. Bulgarian cosmonaut Georgi Ivanov and the commander of the flight Nikolay Rukavishnikov were on board. The flight went very dramatically. The cosmonauts made emergency landing 320 kilometers southeast of Djezkazgan after making 31 full orbits around Earth. The crew spent 1 day, 23 hours and 1 minute in space.

I remember absolutely everything. We started the preparations to board the spaceship in the morning. Earlier, I attended a one-year training course at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. We trained and studied the space ship and the cosmodrome during the courses. Ten days before our flight, I participated in a training course at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Bulgaria’s first cosmonaut recalls.