[1] After leaving school, Strekalov began work as an apprentice coppersmith at OKB-1, Sergei Korolev's experimental design bureau, where he help assemble Sputnik 1.

[2] As part of an operations group, he participated in mission control for flights of scientific research vehicles belonging to the Academy of Sciences.

As the spacecraft separated from the aerodynamic fairing that shielded it during launch, part of its Igla rendezvous radar system was damaged.

[4] The crew attempted a manual docking, using only optical instruments aboard their spacecraft and guided by ground radar, but the approach was unsuccessful and Titov had to brake and dive to avoid a collision.

Strekalov and Titov's capsule was dragged (at accelerations of more than 10 G) to safety and landed 4 km (2.5 mi) from the pad, its occupants bruised but otherwise uninjured.

[1][2] The crew stayed on Salyut-7 until 11 April 1984, and returned to Earth not in the spacecraft in which they had come, but in the reentry module of Soyuz T-10, which was already docked at the space station.

[1] But he returned to flight status for the Shuttle–Mir Program and on 14 March 1995 he flew on Soyuz TM-21 to the Mir space station, accompanied by Vladimir Dezhurov and American astronaut Norman Thagard.

Strekalov, believing the proposal to be too dangerous, refused to perform it, and argued with his colleagues on the ground for several days until they acquiesced.