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Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov,2nd man to orbit Earth, dies |
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September 22, 2000
MOSCOW (AP) - Gherman Titov, a towering hero of the Soviet-American space race, has died in Moscow at age 65, police said Thursday. The body of the highly-decorated cosmonaut and airman was found Wednesday in a sauna in his apartment. He apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning, the police press service said. Titov was the second man to orbit the Earth, following 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. In between the two Soviet flights, American astronaut Alan Shepard made a sub-orbital 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 on 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, and was stationed in the Leningrad military district. From there, he was recruited to be a cosmonaut, and he was 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. |