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Attractive vintage Soviet poster celebrating the first joint French-Soviet space flight. The poster artist was R. Suryaninov ("Р. Сурьянинов").
Soyuz T-6 was a human spaceflight to Earth orbit to the Salyut 7 space station in 1982. Along with two Soviet cosmonauts, the crew included a Frenchman, Jean-Loup Chrétien. The Soyuz-T spacecraft arrived at Salyut 7 following launch on June 24, 1982 and one day of solo operations. During the T-6 mission's time docked to the station, the crew performed joint Soviet-French experiments, including cardiovascular echography, alongside the station's resident crew.
The French-Soviet space relationship began during the 1960s when the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its apex. The relationship lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union and continued thereafter. Tens of laboratories and hundreds of scientists and engineers of both countries participated, and France took part in some of the most important Soviet space missions, including interplanetary flights, space station activities, and advanced astrophysics missions. This highly visible East-West technological collaboration was unique until the 1980s when the Soviet space program began to open itself more broadly to Western countries. The only larger cooperative achievement has been the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous of 1975.
