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Mirosław Hermaszewski (; 15 September 1941 – 12 December 2022) was a Polish cosmonaut, fighter plane pilot, and Polish Air Force officer. He became the first and, at the time of his death in December 2022, only Polish national to ever go to space when he flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz 30 spacecraft in 1978. He was the 89th human to reach outer space.
Early life and education
Mirosław Hermaszewski was born on 15 September 1941 At the time of the massacre, Hermaszewski was only 18 months old; the youngest victim from his family was 1½ years old, while the oldest—Hermaszewski's grandfather—was 90.
Although he has since highlighted the need to depart from nationalist sentiments and to accept responsibility for the genocide, Hermaszewski also condemned discrimination of the Ukrainian nation as a whole based on the actions of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Ukrainian villagers who aided them in the murders. In an April 2015 interview with NaTemat.pl about the massacres, he was quoted as saying:
During their time in orbit, Klimuk and Hermaszewski carried out various geoscience experiments and photographed the Earth – orbiting it 126 times. Over the duration of their stay at the space station, Hermaszewski and Klimuk—sometimes with the aid of Vladimir Kovalyonok and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov, the two other cosmonauts who had already been stationed at Salyut 6 prior to the arrival of the Soyuz 30 mission—carried out a total of eleven different experiments while in space that had been planned internationally as part of the programme.
They landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan, 300 km west of Tselinograd. After the spaceflight, Hermaszewski achieved hero status in the countries of the Eastern Bloc (especially the Polish People's Republic) and was awarded several high honours, including the rarely-given-to-foreigners Hero of the Soviet Union title for his participation in the mission. In 1985, he co-founded the Association of Space Explorers. Hermaszewski later became President of the Polish Astronautical Society (a position he held from 1986 to 1990). In 1982 he advanced to pułkownik military rank. Between 1991 and 1992, Hermaszewski served as second-in-command of the Polish Air Force and Air Defence. In the 2002 Polish local elections, again as a candidate of the social-democratic SLD-UP party, he was elected into the Mazovian Regional Assembly with 10,463 votes. He then became a member of the SLD party and ran once again in Polish parliamentary elections in 2005, with 5,223 votes but no mandate. In 2009, Universitas published his autobiographical story Ciężar nieważkości. Opowieść pilota-kosmonauty ("The Weight of Weightlessness. Story of a Pilot-Cosmonaut") to positive reception from readers, leading to reprints and several expanded versions being published in the decade that followed. In 2018, the conservative ruling Law and Justice party of Poland—mirroring similar efforts from 2007—tried to vote through a law that would collectively demote all former members of the aforementioned WRON from the early 1980s to the lowest rank of private, including Hermaszewski. The so-called "degradation act" was met with controversy in Polish and foreign media primarily due to the case of Hermaszewski, who was initially included as a member of the WRON without his consent or knowledge. In the end, the proposed law was vetoed by President Andrzej Duda, who used Hermaszewski's case as one of the reasons why the "degradation act" needs to be rewritten.
Personal life
thumb|250px|Mirosław Hermaszewski at a meeting in [[Warsaw, May 2016]]
Hermaszewski was interested in aviation and model aircraft from an early age. He was married to Emilia (née Łazar) Hermaszewska from 1966 until his death; together they had two children, Mirosław (born 1966) and Emilia (born 1974). They also had four grandchildren: Julia, Amelia, Emilia, and Stanisław as well as a pet Yorkshire Terrier Giokonda. Hermaszewski's daughter Emilia married politician Ryszard Czarnecki.
During their training and after their joint mission to the Salyut 6 orbital station, Pyotr Klimuk and Mirosław Hermaszewski befriended each other – they stayed in touch and remained close friends ever since. Mirosław also befriended numerous other persons associated with the Soviet space programme during his time in Russia and Kazakhstan, including members of Yuri Gagarin's family and Alexei Leonov. He regularly visited schools and spoke with children of all ages, as well as attending interviews with various media outlets; he has been described as a "modest and likeable person". Hermaszewski said he had an "aesthetic experience" that transformed into a "spiritual experience" while aboard the Soyuz 30 in space, but he viewed faith and religion as an intimate and private matter.
Hermaszewski was highly critical of for-profit spaceflight and viewed space exploration as something that should to be done for science and human progress. In an interview he once stated: