- Born
- Died
- Birth nameSigmund Werner Paul Jähn
- After school, Jähn completed training as a book printer from 1951 to 1955. He then did his military service in the GDR army, where he was deployed in the air force. Jähn then worked as a pilot in the Soviet Air Force in the GDR. From 1966 to 1970 he studied at the Soviet Military Academy "J. A. Gagarin" in Monino. In 1970, Jähn was appointed inspector for fighter pilot training and flight safety in the staff of the GDR air force.
He held this position until 1976. In 1976, Jähn was appointed as a cosmonaut in the GDR and as such was sent to Moscow for training, where he prepared for his future space flight. On August 26, 1978, Jähn flew in the Soviet space capsule "Soyuz 31" to the space station "Salyut-6". He spent a week there with his Soviet colleague Valeri Fyodorovich Bykowski. On the return flight, the "Soyuz 29" space capsule hit exceptionally hard, causing the GDR cosmonaut to sustain permanent back damage.
Jähn subsequently received numerous honors as the first German in space. He was made a "Hero of the GDR" and a "Hero of the Soviet Union" and the cult surrounding the GDR cosmonaut led to the renaming of numerous schools and other public institutions. Jähn then began studying physics in Potsdam, which he completed with a doctorate in 1983. After the fall of the GDR and its dissolution, Jähn worked as a consultant for the Russian cosmonaut training center and, from 1993, also for the European Space Agency (ESA).
The exhibition, which was set up in Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz in 1979, was expanded in terms of content in 1991/92 to become the "German Space Exhibition". In memory of Jähn's contributions to space travel, the planetoid 1998BF14 was named after the former GDR cosmonaut in 2001.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- SpouseErika(? - September 21, 2019) (his death, 2 children)
- Born before the beginning of World War II in a little German village in the Saxon Vogtland and grew up as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, the East German cosmonaut (or astronaut in the west) was 1978 the first German ever in space.
- Was the first and only person ever to be awarded the honorary title "Pilot-Cosmonaut of the German Democratic Republic". As the issuing country was reunited with West Germany in 1990, this title is no longer awarded.
- Before I flew I was already aware of how small and vulnerable our planet is; but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that human kind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.
- Man is technologically advanced. He can build space stations, link them together in space and thinks about landing on Mars, but his development seems to have stagnated since the Stone Age.
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