X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Valentin Bondarenko


Valentin Bondarenko

James Oberg, in his book Red Star in Orbit, wrote how the Soviet government airbrushed out the cosmonaut's image from an official 1961 photograph of the first six cosmonauts selected for training, while British researcher Rex Hall showed that five people had been erased from an earlier group photograph of 16 cosmonauts.

Bondarenko's death was caused by fire in a sealed, high-oxygen environment, which also befell the crew of Apollo 1.

According to Golyakhovsky, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent several hours at the hospital as "deathwatch officer" and Bondarenko died of shock 16 hours after the accident, less than three weeks before Gagarin's historic spaceflight.



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