The Proton footage, shown on Soviet television and elsewhere, included the final countdown and liftoff. It was a revelation to many observers and analysts of the Soviet space program at home and abroad. Prior to the launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, images of the Proton never had been released.
Today these images, showing a white rocket rising over the horizon, look like they are from another era.
At the time, the powerful standard booster had been in operation in the Soviet space fleet for almost two decades, playing a crucial role in the fruitless Soviet effort to put a man in orbit around the moon, as well as for numerous planetary missions to Venus and Mars.
Prior to the Vega launch, the general public outside the Soviet space industry had only glimpsed the mysterious vehicle, shown with its crucial parts cropped off in a grainy documentary released by Soviet authorities to the public.
By broadcasting the Proton launch on television, the Soviets championed the openness of their space program at the time.
Conceived in the early 1980s while the Cold War remained intense, the Vega mission was an unprecedented gesture by the Soviets toward openness that actually prompted officials to release the launch footage.
Unlike previous Soviet planetary spacecraft, designed and built with only very limited foreign involvement, Vega carried a wide spectrum of instruments designed in several Western European countries.
In the course of the mission, the Soviet authorities allowed a level of contact between its participants that had been unseen before this flight.
The international nature of the mission eventually prompted the Soviet authorities to release images of the launch after years of complete secrecy around Proton launch operations.
The mission also returned science that many were anxious to net. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the scientific community and astronomy buffs around the world waited anxiously for the return of the Halley's Comet, one of the most prominent and mysterious celestial bodies known to mankind.
Over the centuries, Halley's Comet had stunned Earthlings with its spectacular visits every 76 years. Its regular apparitions were immortalized in art worldwide -- in Gothic gobelins, Giotto paintings and 1910 photographs, the comet passed in the 1980s by a civilization immersed in the Space Age.
Space exploration powers around the world were racing to get the best view. Members of the European Space Agency put their efforts toward a project called Giotto, aimed at a closest possible encounter with the comet's core.
Meanwhile, Japan was sending two spacecraft to fly by the comet. NASA, hampered by problems of shuttle development, could not afford an ambitious flyby project conceived by some of its scientists. However, the agency did plan an intensive observation program using ground- and space-based instruments.
With Vega, Soviet scientists added the Halley flyby as an extra assignment for their previously approved and financed mission to Venus. The project became known as Vega, the combination of Russian words Venus and Halley.
The mission involved two identical spacecraft on a fly-by trajectory to Venus, each to deliver a descent module for a soft landing on the planets surface and a balloon with instruments for release into the planets atmosphere. The spacecraft then was to continue on a long swing around the sun for the encounter with Halley's Comet.
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