The two were sent for flight training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre on 10 January 1987. Aleksandrov was pictured in splashdown training with Vladimir Lyakhov and Aleksandr Serebrov in November, but the crew was later announced to include Anatoly Solovyev and Viktor Savinykh instead. Lyakhov and Serebrov were assigned to the backup crew with Stoyanov. The flight and its scientific programme were named Shipka, after Shipka Pass where a crucial battle between Ottoman troops and a Bulgarian-Russian force occurred during the Liberation War of Bulgaria in 1877.