Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
From my usual news source guy...
MOSCOW (AP) - Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth and a towering hero of the Soviet-American space race, has died at age 65, police said Thursday.
The body of the highly decorated cosmonaut and airman was found Wednesday in a sauna in his Moscow apartment. He apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning, the police press service said.
Titov's orbit of the Earth followed his compatriot Yuri Gagarin's historic flight in the Vostok-1 space capsule in April 1961. The Soviet Union launched Vostok-2 four month after Gagarin's flight, and it carried Titov around the planet 17 times in a 25-hour flight.
Between the two Soviet flights, American astronaut Alan Shepard made a suborbital flight in May 1961.
At 25, Titov was the youngest man yet to fly in space, and he became an idol for generations of Soviet citizens. He received the Soviet Union's highest awards, including the order of Hero of the Soviet Union, the Lenin Prize and the Lenin Order for Service to the Fatherland.
Titov was born Sept. 11, 1935, in the village of Verkhneye Zhilino in the Altai Territory, close to Russia's border with Kazakstan. He attended a school for military pilots, was recruited to be a cosmonaut and became a standby for Gagarin, the ITAR-Tass news agency said.
Following his space flight, Titov became a test pilot and in 1968 he graduated from the Soviet Air Force Academy. He later worked in a space research institute and in the Soviet Defense Ministry.
He was elected to the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, in 1995 as a member of the Communist Party faction. He didn't run for a second term last year.
Titov wrote several books devoted to space travel: ``Seventeen Space Dawns,'' ``The Planet's First Cosmonaut,'' ``My Blue Planet,'' and ``On the Stellar and Earth Orbits.''
There was no information available on survivors or funeral arrangements.
AP-NY-09-21-00 0455EDT
------------------ "My dear, I used to think that I was serving humanity... and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases Jubal Harshaw." ---Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land
posted
"We sent Yuri Gagarin up to see if he could find the Kingdom of Heaven. He didn't see anything, so we sent up Gherman Titov to make sure, and he didn't find it either." -- Leonid Brezhnev
Guess he's just making sure again...
------------------ "Ed Gruberman, you fail to grasp Ty Kwan Leap. Approach me, that you might see." -- The Master
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