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Gherman Stepanovich Titov
VGherman Stepanovich Titov was a Soviet
cosmonaut and, in 1961, the second man to orbit the Earth, preceded
by Yuri Gagarin.
After graduating as an air force pilot, he was
selected for cosmonaut training in 1960. His results in training
matched those of Yuri Gagarin, yet Titov was chosen to fly second
because Gagarin was older and appeared more psychologically and
politically reliable.
Titov flew the Vostok 2 mission launched on 6
August 1961. It lasted for 25.3 hours and he performed 17 orbits of
the earth. His call sign was Eagle. He landed close to the town of
Krasny Kut in Saratov Oblast, Russia. A month short of 26 years old
at launch, he remains the youngest person to fly in space. Titov
was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as were
all the Soviet cosmonauts.
He was the first person to suffer from "space
sickness" (motion sickness in space) and was also the first person
to sleep in space. He slept for roughly one orbit and was surprised
to wake with his arms floating in the air due to the absence of
normal gravity. He returned to sleep after putting his arms under a
security belt, then slept 30 minutes more than predicted by the
flight plan. He stated that "Once you have your arms and legs
arranged properly, space sleep is fine ... I slept like a
baby".
Following his space flight, Titov assumed
various senior positions in the Soviet space programme until his
retirement in 1992. In 1995, he was elected to the State Duma as a
member of the Communist Party. He died of cardiac arrest in his
sauna at the age of 65 in Moscow. He was buried in the Novodevichy
Cemetery.
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