Cosmonaut dies of stroke
2009-09-30 22:15
Moscow - Pavel Popovich, the sixth man to go into orbit and fourth Soviet cosmonaut to go to space, has died at a sanatorium at the age of 79, space officials said.
Popovich is best known for piloting the Vostok-4 probe that in August 1962 took part in the first ever instance of two manned satellites orbiting the earth at the same time.
The other probe, Vostok-3, was piloted by Andriyan Nikolayev, who died in 2004. Popovich later took part in a longer 15-day mission as commander of the Soyuz-14 spacecraft in July 1974.
"Pavel Romanovich Popovich died on Wednesday in one of the sanatoriums in Crimea. Now everything is being done to take his body to Moscow," the head of the federation of cosmonauts, Vladimir Kovalenok, told ITAR-TASS news agency.
ITAR-TASS quoted sources as saying that Popovich died of a stroke. He was five days short of his 80th birthday.
Popovich, born in 1929 in the Kiev region of what is now Ukraine, was part of a pioneering team of cosmonauts who were trained to pilot the Vostok craft that were the first manned probes the Soviets sent into space.
He always described himself as the first Ukrainian to go to space.
He later took part in the Soviet manned lunar programme which was shut down after failing to beat the US to put a man on the moon. Popovich won two Hero of the Soviet Union awards, his country's highest honour.
The first Soviet man in space, Yuri Gagarin, died in a plane crash in 1968 while the second, Gherman Titov, died in 2000.
- SAPA