Soyuz 28 was a 1978 Soviet manned mission to the orbiting Salyut 6 space station.
Cosmonaut Vladimír Remek from Czechoslovakia became the first person launched into space who was not a citizen of the United States or the Soviet Union. The other crew member was Aleksei Gubarev. The flight was the first mission in the Intercosmos program that gave Eastern Bloc and other communist states access to space through manned and unmanned launches. Interkosmos was a Soviet space program, designed to help the Soviet Union’s allies with manned and unmanned space missions.
The program included the allied east European nations of the Warsaw Pact and other socialist nations like Afghanistan, Cuba, Mongolia, and Vietnam. In addition, pro Soviet nations such as India and Syria participated, and even France and Austria, despite them being capitalist nations.