Famed Cosmonaut Titov Dead at 65

Cosmonaut German Titov, the second Russian in space after Yury Gagarin and the first person to spend more than a day in orbit, has died at age 65, police said Thursday.

A police spokesman said initial indications suggested Titov had probably died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a sauna near his apartment late Wednesday. A post-mortem will be held.

Gennady Seleznyov, speaker of parliament?€™s lower house State Duma where the white-haired Titov was once a Communist deputy, said the ex-cosmonaut may have suffered a heart attack.

President Vladimir Putin sent a telegram of condolence to his widow, praising Titov as a pioneer of space exploration.

"A bold and courageous man, he was one of the first to pave the way to the stars. His name will forever remain as a symbol of the great victories of Russia?€™s space program," Putin said.

But Titov always stood in the shadow of Gagarin, whose historic 108-minute flight on April 12, 1961, stunned the world and pushed the Soviet Union ahead of its Cold War rival, the United States, in the accelerating race to conquer space.

Titov said last year that he only learned it was Gagarin and not himself who had been chosen for the first space flight two days before blastoff.

"I was frustrated, of course, because up to the last minute I thought my chances were high enough that I could have been the commander of the Vostok capsule," Titov said.

However, he said it was a professional jealousy and that he only realized after the flight the enormity of the event.

"The historical significance became clear only on April 14 when we were invited on to Red Square and I saw the ocean of people screaming, smiling, all happy, singing songs," he said.

"And then I realized something extraordinary had happened."

Gagarin?€™s mission was followed by a 15-minute suborbital flight by U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard.

But Titov?€™s own flight aboard the tiny Vostok-2 spacecraft on Aug. 6 and 7, 1961, was the first full-scale space mission and set several new milestones.



During the flight, which lasted 25 hours, 18 minutes, he became the first person to sleep in space and the first to experience space sickness ?€” an experience he hid from Mission Control until his return.

He still holds the record as the youngest man in space ?€” he flew when he was 25 ?€” and has a crater on the moon named after him.

He was the last survivor of the four men, two Russian and two American, to make the pioneer flights in 1961.

On his return to Earth, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rewarded Titov with immediate membership in the Communist Party "without a waiting period."

Titov was typically self-effacing about that event. "Honestly speaking, I didn?€™t really care. Whether a Party member or not, I was a specialist just doing my job," he said.

He never flew again in space but worked for decades in the Soviet military space forces.

In the 1980s he worked on the Buran program to create a Russian space shuttle but it was eventually scrapped after making one unmanned flight.

In the post-Soviet years, Titov plunged into politics and represented the Communist Party in the Duma defense committee.

Friends paid tribute to his qualities Thursday. "He was a gentle, kind, sensitive person who always tried to help people. But he set high standards and could be hard to work for," said Konstantin Khodyrev, a Duma aide.

Despite his Communist credentials, Titov was a Christian believer baptized into Russia?€™s Orthodox Church ?€” a faith he had to keep secret during Soviet times when he had a high public profile.

He also confided that he and Gagarin used to dream that their careers would end with a flight to Mars. "But you see life has made some course corrections," he said.