J.Gurragchaa, the first Mongolian in space is celebrating his 70th birthday today (5 December). Parliamentary Office Secretary Ts.Tsolmon, has received the former cosmonaut  at State House and congratulated  him on his birthday.

The famous space flight took place at 2.58 pm on March 22 of 1981, when the  ‘Soyuz-39’ spaceship blasted into space from the USSR’s Baikonur cosmodrome; on board with J.Gurragchaa, was the Kazakh cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov.

The pair spent 7 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes in the space and successfully landed on earth after completing 124 orbits. This was the first-ever space flight for a Mongolian and a landmark in the nation’s history.

J.Gurragchaa was the first Mongolian in space and the second Asian cosmonaut. He was trained at the Gagarin Research and Cosmonaut Training Centre in the former Soviet Union, as a pilot of the Soyuz spaceship along with his countryman M.Ganzorig.

The re-entry capsule of J.Gurragchaa’s ‘Soyuz-39’ spaceship can be seen in the National Mongolian Space Museum in Ulaanbaatar.