Soyuz 2 was launched on October 25th, 1968 at 9em UTC from Site 1, also known as Gagarin Start at Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was the Soyuz 7KOK spacecraft substantially improved in the year and a half since the tragedy of Soyuz 1, but carried no crew. It was the target vehicle for the docking of Soyuz 3, which was to launch the next day carrying Cosmonaut Yorgie Beregovoy. While the parachute issue which had condemned Vladimir Comrov and Soyuz 1 was presumed fixed, the Soyuz base program managers decided to minimize the risk to human life by having Soyuz 2 uncrewed instead of the 3 crew it would have had if the Soyuz 1 and 2 joint mission had taken place as planned. Instead of a total of 4 Cosmonauts involved in the rendezvous and docking, as had been the plan for Soyuz 1 and 2, there would only be 1 Cosmonaut for the Soyuz 2 and 3 combined mission. Given what happened in Soyuz 1, of course, the priority was to recover the 1 Cosmonaut successfully and the rendezvous and docking was rightfully considered a bonus. That's why when Soyuz 3 launched on October 26 at 834 AM UTC from Site 31 at Baikonur Cosmodrome, it was carrying Yorgie Beregovoy. At 47 years of age, he was the oldest Cosmonaut to fly to space by a fair bit with most of the others in their 20s and 30s. That came with it a great deal of experience and thanks to his combat missions in IL-2 during the Second World War, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, which normally other Cosmonauts received after the missions in space. The upside of this was to focus even more attention on the mission. The downside was that it was difficult for anyone to take him to task in training and having tested around 60 aircraft in his test pilot career after the war, Beregovoy may have been overconfident. He failed the P-Launch exam, scoring only 2 out of 5 points, which would normally have meant that the prime backup would launch instead. However, the head of Cosmod Training, Nikolai Kaminin, had also been Beregovoy's commander during the war. The Beregovoy was given a second attempt at the exam, got 4 out of 5 and launched. The launch of Soyuz-3 placed it within 10 kilometers of Soyuz-2, so the rendezvous portion was made as simple as possible. The Igla rendezvous system got Soyuz-3 around 200 meters of Soyuz-2, where Beregovoy took manual control. As he moved closer to Soyuz-2, he also lost contact with the ground. By the time contact had been regained, Soyuz-3 was no longer in proper position and had used it up to propel it reserved for the rendezvous in docking. The Cosmod said the craft from misaligned, but was unable to adequately explain what had happened, including after the fact. He placed the blame squarely on the Igla system, but subsequent investigation revealed that it was pilot error. He had not aligned correctly, used the thrusters too roughly, and had not realized that Soyuz-2's program was deliberately avoiding a bad approach. On the positive side, he returned safely, and it didn't take much effort to spin the mission as a success. The American Space Program was readily convinced that the Soviets were hot on their trail, and unwilling to be blindsided by another Soviet first. The Soviet government insisted that no docking had been planned to make it seem like a complete success, and that aspect of the mission only came out after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2002, Spacecraft designer and Voskod won the Cosmod Constantine Fick T-Stov, made it clear that Beregovoy had committed the basic error of not checking the orientation of his target before attempting to approach. It had been a four day mission in total, allowing Beregovoy to test the other systems on board and the revamped Soyuz, and he landed in Kazakhstan on October 30th at 725 AMGMT. Soyuz 4 and 5 would finally demonstrate docking successfully, but not without peril. Thank you for watching this mission profile of Soyuz-2 and 3.