Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dzhanibekov (Russian: Владимир Александрович Джанибеков, born 13 May 1942) is a retired Soviet Air Force Major General and a cosmonaut veteran of five orbital missions.

As her father had no sons, Dzhanibekov took his wife's family name in order to honour her ancestry and continue her line of descent, an unusual step for a husband in the Soviet Union.

In 1961 he decided to enroll in the V. M. Komarov Higher Military Flying School at Yeisk while simultaneously completing his degree in physics at the Taganrog campus of Rostov State University.

Four years later he graduated and became a flying instructor in the Soviet Air Forces serving at military training unit number 99735 in Taganrog in 1968–1970.

The effect had been long known from the tennis racket theorem, which says that rotation about an object's intermediate principal axis is unstable while in free fall.

A proof of concept flight, launched from Tillamook, Oregon on 8 September 1990, was crewed by Dzhanibekov, Newman, Tim Lachenmeier, and Don Moses.

The flight lasted for continuous 31 hours, spanning two nights, before landing at Omak, Washington, and confirmed the sky anchor balloon nominal performance.