The two-man crew, commander Nikolai Rukavishnikov and Bulgarian cosmonaut Georgi Ivanov, suffered a steep ballistic re-entry, but were safely recovered.

Bulgarian cosmonaut Georgi Ivanov joined commander Nikolai Rukavishnikov as the craft proceeded normally towards the Salyut 6 space station.

But, as the craft approached to 1,000 meters (3,300 ft), the engine failed and automatically shut down after three seconds of a planned six-second burn.

After consulting with ground control, the docking system was activated again, but the engine shut down again, and Valery Ryumin, observing from the station, reported an abnormal lateral glow from behind the Soyuz during the burn.

[3] Rukavishnikov could not sleep, however, and thought about the novel Marooned, which featured an American space crew stranded in orbit.

One option to return the crew if the backup engine was inoperable would have been to use attitude control thrusters to slow the Soyuz below orbit velocity, but it was not known if there was enough propellant to do this, and the landing point would have been unpredictable even if it had worked.

[2] The high G-loads during reentry were a mix of crew error and a design flaw in the autopilot; because the backup engine produced less thrust than the main engine, the autopilot tried to run it until the proper delta V was achieved, but the cosmonauts issued a manual shutoff command after 213 seconds of burn time.

This would have caused the Soyuz to land uprange of the planned landing point, but the low delta-V (as the result of the crew manually shutting off the engine early) resulted in the opposite effect and instead, the capsule touched down very close to the target area.