The crew, consisting of Russian cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov, launched along with space journalist Toyohiro Akiyama on December 2, 1990 aboard Soyuz TM-11.

Joining Afanasyev and Munarov for launch and trip to Mir was Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama, an employee of TBS.

He used broadcasting equipment that was delivered to the station by a Progress-M spacecraft and set up by the EO-7 crew prior to the arrival of EO-8.

Akiyama returned to Earth on December 10 with the outgoing EO-7 crew aboard Soyuz TM-10 after approximately one week in space.

Another attempt was made to dock the craft to the station on March 23, but the approach was again aborted due to a "catastrophic error.

Meanwhile, a backup Progress was prepared for launch to deliver needed supplies to the station in case M-7 failed to dock.

During the approach to the aft port, the Soyuz followed a similar trajectory as the Progress and it was concluded that the problem was with Mir rather than the craft.

During the three-hour-and-thirty-four-minute EVA, they filmed the damaged antenna on the Kvant module and re-installed the Kvant-2 camera they had removed during the first spacewalk.