Remembering Talgat Musabayev: Kazakhstan’s Legendary Cosmonaut and National Hero

On August 4, news broke that Talgat Musabayev had passed away.

Musabayev was one of Kazakhstan’s three cosmonauts and a recipient of the Halyk Kaharmany title. He was 74.

Orda.kz looks back at the legacy he left behind — both in orbit and back on Earth.

From Aviation to Outer Space

Musabayev said his dream of becoming a cosmonaut was born the day Yuri Gagarin flew to space. It took him 33 years to make that dream a reality.

He graduated from the Riga Civil Aviation Engineering Institute in 1974 and spent years working in Kazakhstan’s civil aviation sector. In 1977, he joined the Almaty aviation club under DOSAAF, the Soviet paramilitary training society.

By 1987, he had become a licensed pilot after graduating from a flight school in Ulyanovsk — coinciding with the Jeltoqsan events, which were triggered by the appointment of Gennady Kolbin, former Ulyanovsk party chief, as First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party.

The Long Road to Space

Initially, Musabayev wasn’t accepted into the cosmonaut corps. That changed after a direct appeal to the then Kazakh SSR leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.

At the time, Musabayev was just a second pilot on a Tu-134, waiting outside Nazarbayev’s office among ministers and high officials. A call from Nazarbayev led to his referral to Moscow for selection.

He officially joined the cosmonaut corps in October 1991 — just 12 days after Toktar Aubakirov, Kazakhstan’s first cosmonaut, had returned from his flight to the Mir space station. Aubakirov never flew again, but Musabayev would go on to complete three missions — each remarkable in its own right.

First Mission: January 7 – November 4, 1994

Board engineer on Mir. Musabayev became the first citizen of independent Kazakhstan to travel to space.

Second Mission: January 29 – August 25, 1998

Commander on Mir. During this 207-day mission, he set a spacewalk record — spending 32 hours outside the station across six excursions. At the time, no one had ever spent more than 24 hours in open space during a single mission.

The feat earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

Third Mission: April 28 – May 6, 2001

Commander of a short flight to the International Space Station. Onboard was the world’s first space tourist, Dennis Tito, who jokingly called Musabayev his “No. 1 babysitter” — after the cosmonaut helped him through a heart scare during launch and treated a head injury aboard the station.

No Kazakh would fly to space again for 14 years. The next and, so far, last was Aydin Aimbetov, who flew in September 2015.

Among other notable achievements, Musabayev was the first to bring both the Kazakh flag and a Quran into orbit. He said no one before or after him had carried the Quran into space.

In 1999, between his second and third flights, Musabayev presented Nazarbayev with a “Flag of Peace” that had flown in space — alongside Soviet legend Alexei Leonov and Russian scientist and broadcaster Sergey Kapitsa.

Life After Space

After his final mission, Musabayev briefly served in the Russian Armed Forces. In 2003, he was appointed head of combat training for the Russian Army’s aviation command.

He returned to Kazakhstan in 2005. From 2007 to 2016, he led the country’s National Space Agency. He later served as a senator in the Kazakh Parliament until 2023.

Original Author: Igor Ulitin