Soyuz 10

Soyuz 10 was a crewed Soviet spaceflight launched on 22 April 1971 with cosmonauts Vladimir Shatalov, Aleksei Yeliseyev and Nikolai Rukavishnikov aboard. It was the first mission sent to the world's first space station, Salyut 1, and the first flight of the upgraded Soyuz 7K-OKS spacecraft, which carried a probe and drogue docking mechanism with an internal passage for crew transfer. The approach went wrong: the automatic control system failed during the final approach because of a design oversight, a soft dock was achieved on 24 April 1971, but the computer sensed a misalignment and fired the attitude jets, so a hard dock could not be made and a large amount of propellant was used up. Ground controllers eventually had the crew throw a circuit breaker in the docking mechanism, which retracted the probe and let the capsule undock. The crew never entered the station. Toxic fumes filled the capsule during re-entry and Rukavishnikov lost consciousness, yet all three men landed safely northeast of Karaganda in Kazakhstan after the first night landing of a crewed spacecraft. The automatic control system was redesigned for later flights, and the mission was the first of several docking failures in the Soviet station program.