Valentin Vasilyevich Bondarenko

Valentin Bondarenko
Country:	Soviet Union
Organization:	WWS
selected on	April 28, 1960 (1st cosmonaut group)
Calls:	0 space flights
retired on	March 23, 1961 (fatal training accident)

Valentin Bondarenko ( Russian Валентин Васильевич Бондаренко ., Scientific transliteration Valentin Bondarenko Vasil'evič * 16th February 1937 in Kharkov , Ukrainian SSR ; † 23. March 1961 in Moscow ) was a Ukrainian - Soviet fighter pilot and astronaut candidate. He was selected in 1960 for use in a space flight with the Vostok spacecraft and belonged to the so-called " cosmonaut group no. 1 ". When he arrived at Star City , the training center for Soviet cosmonauts, at the age of 23 he was the youngest man ever chosen for space flight training.

On March 23, 1961, Bondarenko was the victim of a fatal accident in the course of preparations. At the end of the tenth day of a fifteen-day training session in a pressurized cabin at the Moscow Institute of Aerospace Medicine, he removed the medical sensors attached to his body and wiped the places where they were attached with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. He negligently threw this over an open heating coil, on which he heated water for tea, in the direction of the waste basket. One of these fell on the hot heating coil - a serious security gap that was only to be discovered through this incident - and caught fire. Then he tried to express the limited flame with the sleeve of his woolen tracksuit. Because of the pure oxygen atmosphere in the hermetically sealed cabin, Bondarenko's clothes ignited in seconds. Due to the high pressure difference, the cabin could not be opened immediately. By the time he did that, Bondarenko had already suffered 90 percent burns . He died a few hours later in a hospital. He left a wife and a son. He was buried in his hometown of Kharkiv. The members of the cosmonaut group nominated for the flight from Vostok 1 had been in Baikonur since March 17, 1961 . The occasionally rumored dying care of Bondarenko by Gagarin is therefore a legend.

As was customary in the Soviet Union, this accident - and therefore Bondarenko himself - went unmentioned by the Soviet media. The incident was kept top secret so as not to jeopardize the image of Soviet space travel. It was not until 1986 that Bondarenko and his tragic death became public through a publication in the Izvestia newspaper . A moon crater was later named after Bondarenko .

See also

• Soviet space travel
• First cosmonaut group in the Soviet Union
• Apollo 1 , in a test in 1967 three astronauts died in a similar way

Web links

• Biography at spacefacts.de
• Full biography (Russian)
• James Oberg: Dead Cosmonauts (excerpt from "Uncovering Soviet Disasters")

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kamanin Diaries in the Encyclopedia Astronautica , accessed February 1, 2017. See entries from March 17, 22 and 23, 1961.