Mirosław Hermaszewski

Mirosław Hermaszewski (born September 14, 1941, Lipniki, Wolynian Voivodshi, Poland—died December 12, 2022, Warsaw) is a Polish pilot who was the first Pole in space.

A 1965 graduate of the military pilot school in Deblin, Hermaszewski entered the Polish air force and in 1971 graduated from the Karol Sverchevski Military Academy. In 1976 he was selected from a pool of 500 pilots to participate in the Soviet Union’s Intercosmos program. The non-Soviet cosmonauts of Intercosmos flew alongside Soviet crews on missions intended to demonstrate unity between Warsaw Pact and other countries sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Hermaszewski’s was the second Intercosmos mission, launched on June 27, 1978.

As a research cosmonaut on the Soyuz 30 mission, Hermaszewski spent nearly eight days in space, carrying out scientific experiments and photographing Earth’s surface from the Salyut 6 space station. On July 5, 1978, the team returned to Earth, landing 300 km (200 miles) west of Tselinograd (now Astana, Kazakhstan).

Hermaszewski became one of only a handful of non-Soviets to be named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Soviet Order of Lenin, the Polish Order of the Grunwald Cross (1st degree), and the Nicolaus Copernicus medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He returned to service in the Polish air force.

In 1981, without his knowledge, Hermaszewski was placed on Poland’s Military Council for National Salvation, a body that exercised governmental powers during the years of martial law. He was studying in Moscow at the time and had not agreed to serve on th Military Council. He was ordered to return to Poland but after two weeks was released back to his studies. (In 2018, legislation that would have demoted officers who served on the Military Council was vetoed by president Andrzej Duda, and Hermaszewski’s status as a popular national hero was a factor in Duda’s veto.)

Hermaszewski graduated from the Voroshilov Military Academy in Moscow in 1982 before serving as the chief of the Shkola Orlyat High Aviation School and in the Defense Office of Poland. In 1988 he was made a general and, before his retirement, was named second in command of the Headquarters of the Air Force.

Hermaszewski unsuccessfully ran for parliament in 2001 and 2005, but he was elected to the regional assembly in Mazowieckie province in 2002. He wrote an autobiography, The Weight of Weightlessness: Story of a Pilot-Cosmonaut (2009).