Pyotr Ivanovich Dolgov

The gondola of the Volga balloon, Dolgow can be seen in the small pictures on the left.

Pyotr Dolgov ( Russian Пётр Иванович Долгов * 21 February 1920 in Bogojawlenskoje (now Dolgowo ) Penza province , Soviet Russia ; † 1. November 1962 on Volsk , Soviet Union ) was a Soviet air force officer (last rank Colonel ), parachutists and aerospace pioneer.

Participation in the space program, death during stratospheric jump

Dolgov constructed the ejection seats of the Soviet Vostok - space capsule . He was killed on November 1, 1962 during the stratospheric jump carried out together with Yevgeny Andreev over the Soviet city of Wolsk. Like their US competitor Joseph Kittinger , the two air force officers tested pressure suits, exit devices and parachutes for the manned space program. Andrejew, who in contrast to Kittinger jumped without a control parachute, broke his record for height distance in free fall. At Dolgow, the pressure suit was damaged when he got out of the balloon capsule when his helmet hit the capsule, and he was killed as a result of the loss of pressure. Together with surviving comrade Andreev, Dolgov was posthumously awarded the honorary title Hero of the Soviet Union .

Legends, Dolgow as an alleged "lost cosmonaut"

As is customary in such cases, the exact circumstances of Dolgow's death were not disclosed in detail by the Soviet authorities; it was merely reported that Dolgow had died “in the course of his duties”. This, in conjunction with reports from Western intelligence services about a rocket explosion in Baikonur , later led to the hoax that Dolgow died during the failed rocket launch to a secret Vostok mission in October 1960, a few months before Gagarin's legendary flight , which took place in April 1961 came. The GDR aviation magazine Aerosport reported in an issue in 1964 that Dolgow had "had a fatal accident in 1962 during a research jump from a height of 24,500 m with immediate opening of the parachute".

Another popular legend says that Dolgow was thrown from an airplane with a Vostok capsule sometime before Gagarin's Vostok flight (April 1961) in order to test the exit system and was killed by a leak in his spacesuit. This variant can be read , among other things, in the book Moscow's Great Bluff by Leonid Vladimirov, which was preprinted in 1973 in Spiegel . It can also be found in the novel The Chief Designer by the American science fiction author Andy Duncan , a fictional biography of the Soviet missile designer Sergei Korolev .

Web links

Commons : Pyotr Dolgov  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Dolgow death notice. In: Der Spiegel 47, November 21, 1962.
2. ↑ Aerosport . No. 8 , 1964, pp. 267 .
3. ^ Leonid Vladimirov: Moscow's great bluff. The Secret History of Soviet Space Travel. In: Der Spiegel . 31, July 30, 1973.