#soviet cosmonaut

[solonocturne]

Soviet cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastyanov with his wife and daughter, 1971

[solonocturne]

Soviet cosmonaut Boris Yegorov with his wife Eleanor, 1964

[tiggerpilot]

Время Первых | The Age of Pioneers [ВК] [Instagram] [Twitter] [Космо-группа ВК] [COMMISSIONS OPEN]

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Yuri Gagarin, Cosmonaut - art by Michael Stribling

[magictransistor]

Vifaly Sevastyanov (Вита́лий Ива́нович Севастья́нов), Rumo Ao Cosmos, 1979.

[spaceflightinhistory-blog]

I guess I'll begin a new series of single images tied to particular missions. I will start with the first Vostok mission in 1961 and then move on ahead. Sometimes there will be one post for a mission, sometimes many. The idea is to do a kind of pictorial history of Soviet/Russian human spaceflight from the very beginning to now. I will do parallel series' on other topics in space history too.

So the first picture here is of the three cosmonauts selected as the pool for the very first human spaceflight. From left to right are Yuriy Gagarin, German Titov, and Grigoriy Nelyubov. The picture was taken in Red Square on April 5, 1961, exactly a week prior to the launch of Vostok. History, of course, tells us that Soviet space program managers picked the charismatic and handsome Gagarin to be first. His understudy (or "backup") was Titov, who later on went to fly Vostok-2.

But what happened to Nelyubov? Well, first of all we didn't even know that Nelyubov existed until... 1986 when a Soviet journalist, the estimable Yaroslav Golovanov, revealed his existence, and his ultimate fate in an article in the Russian newspaper Izvestiya. Turns out that Nelyubov was one of the brightest, most ablest of the early cosmonaut candidates. A bit of hubris in there perhaps. He was surely destined to fly one of the early Vostok missions but eventually became embroiled in a gross violation of discipline. In a nutshell: he was drunk, got involved in an altercation with other military people one night, they threatened to complain to Nelyubov's superiors unless he apologized, and Nelyubov refused. In the end, he was fired from the cosmonaut team on April 17, 1963 and whitewashed out of history. He suffered from depression and became more of an alcoholic. He was killed on February 18, 1966 when he fell under a passing train at Ippolitovka, a small train stop in the Soviet far east north of Vladivostok. The cause was probable suicide.

In images published in the 1960s and 1970s, you can see that Nelyubov is absent (lower left picture, back row). When the complete image was published (accidentally) in 1971, he suddenly shows up. Orwellian indeed.

A 50 minute film (in 5 parts) on Nelybov can be seen here at the website of the Russian Federal Space Agency.