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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Once upon a time there was a young woman named Margaret King from New Haven, Connecticut who received a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Boston University and then studied Slavic linguistics at the University of Chicago.
Her life trajectory then took a detour when she obtained her master’s degree in education and found work as a specialist for children with reading disabilities first in Illinois, then in Connecticut where she also worked with incarcerated adults facing literary challenges. Having surmounted learning issues herself as a child, she firmly believed that every person deserved a decent education no matter what.
Maggie had a wide range of outside interests, one of which led to her obtaining an entry-level ham radio license in 1976.
A year later, having married an Australian correctional officer she met in Connecticut, Maggie – now Iaquinto – joined her husband in the state of Victoria and found work with the Council of Adult Education for whom she created a kit on teaching adults how to read, which remained in use for many years.
Maggie earned her Australian amateur radio license and started communicating with other ham radio enthusiasts. And, after her husband was transferred to a small town in western Victoria, she landed a variety of positions culminating in running a computer lab where she polished her tech skills.
Upon divorce, she and her sons moved to Melbourne where she taught information technology in a number of educational facilities and continued connecting with radio enthusiasts around the globe in Morse code using the callsign VK3NQQ and then, as technology improved, by voice through computer connection.
In 1990, she made contact with Musa Manarov callsign U2MIR, onboard the Russian space station Mir and cementing her place in history by helping him set up a packet radio on the station establishing the first computer-to-computer civilian communication between an amateur radio operator on Earth and a cosmonaut in space.
Maggie communicated pretty much daily with Manarov and his colleagues using the Russian she had learned in college, while watching her boys play in the yard or by handheld while commuting to and from work.
Many evenings Maggie would watch the point of light that was the Mir space station cross the night sky as she conversed with cosmonauts eager to hear the news about what was transpiring behind the Iron Curtain free from Soviet censorship.
Manarov returned to Earth after 175 days in space.
Sergei Krikalev
Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev who had been part of a joint Soviet-French science mission in 1988, was the flight engineer for the ninth Mir mission. Accompanied by Commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British astronaut Helen Sharman, Sergei was aboard the Soyuz TM-12 launched on May 19, 1991, as the political cohesion of the Soviet Union began to unravel.
Sharman returned to Earth with the previous crew while Krikalev and Artsebarsky were scheduled to stay until October conducting EVAs, experiments and maintenance. Sergei took over from Manarov, communicating as U5MIR with a number of ham radio operators including Maggie who set up a makeshift digital bulletin board with uncensored news and information on the ongoing implosion of the Soviet Union for the cosmonauts.
Sergei agreed to extend his stay on Mir for a few months more with Soyuz TM-13’s Commander, Alexander Volkov, because the replacement engineer’s slot had been filled by a Soviet-Kazakh cosmonaut-researcher, Toktar Aubakirov, without the training for long-term missions, as an attempt to encourage the then-Kazakh SSR to continue space operations.
Aubakirov and Franz Viehböck, who also arrived on Soyuz TM-13 as the first Austrian in space, photographed their respective countries from orbit and conducted materials processing and medical experiments before returning to Earth with Artsebarsky, while Volkov remained on Mir with Sergei.
Sergei and Volkov were still in space conducting further experiments and maintenance when the political winds in their homeland blew the Soviet Union into dissolution on December 26, 1991. Since the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the landing area were both located in the now independent Kazakhstan, leaving the future of the cosmonauts literally up in the air.
Maggie was in daily radio communication with Sergei throughout, exchanging personal opinions on a wide variety of subjects including discussing the drama of the politics playing out in Russia and the West.
It wasn’t until March 25, 1992, that Sergei and Volkov finally descended to the planet surface. News media referred to the two as the “last Soviet citizens” since they had launched from Soviet Russia but returned to the new Republic of Kazakhstan.
Sergei spent a total of 311 days in space, twice as long as originally planned.
For hard science buffs, the length of time the cosmonaut spent traveling at high speed in the space station slowing clocks microscopically, dilating time as addressed in the velocity-time relativity theories of Einstein and others, meant Sergei returned to Earth 0.02 seconds younger than his contemporaries.
Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică's 1995 Out of the Present, half the budget of which was the cost of launching a 35mm camera to the space station to be operated by those on board, documents Sergei Krikalev’s record-setting story.
Over a five-year period, Maggie communicated with 19 cosmonauts, and the story of the unlikely bond she developed remotely with Sergei forms the basis of Ernesto Daranas’ 2017 film Sergio and Sergei. In it, the connection between a professor and amateur radio enthusiast in Havana and a Mir cosmonaut allows the filmmaker to draw parallels between economic hardships in Cuba at the time and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Maggie’s long-distance friendship with Sergei led to an invitation for her and her sons to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in 1994 where Krikalev was training for a shuttle mission.
Upon her death 10 years ago, Maggie Iaquinto was lauded not only for her contributions to amateur communications from the Earth’s surface to stations orbiting overhead but as a polymath whose broad interests ran the gamut from educator, librarian, mother, crafter, and folk dancer to techie, innovator, car enthusiast, writer and internet addict.
As of January 18, 2024, Sergei Krikalev became Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for international space cooperation, seeking to reform an industry suffering from US-led sanctions.
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
