Konstantin P. Feoktistov

Konstantin P. Feoktistov, born in 1926, Soviet cosmonaut. He was one of the first two civilians in space and took part in the first three-person spaceflight.

Feoktistov was born in Voronezh in western Russia. As a child, he became interested in astronomy and dreamed of lunar exploration. During World War II (1939-1945), when the Nazis occupied his homeland, he became a scout for the Soviets who resisted them. In 1942 he was captured, shot, and left for dead. He survived, however, and after the war graduated from a technical school in Moscow as an engineer.

In 1955 Feoktistov joined a Soviet missile and satellite program. He worked on the Sputnik program with master spacecraft designerSergei Korolyev and became part of Korolyev’s corps of young engineers. Feoktistov worked extensively in designing the Vostok spacecraft used in the first six spaceflights launched by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and then helped redesign the spacecraft for the Voskhod missions.

Feoktistov trained some of the USSR’s first cosmonauts, and as a space engineer he was a steadfast believer that cosmonauts should be engineers, not pilots. As a result, he undertook the difficult cosmonaut training himself; he was approved for spaceflight in 1962.

Two years later, on October 12, 1964, Feoktistov went on his only spaceflight, on the Voskhod 1 mission. He served as technical scientist on a crew that also included mission commander Vladimir Komarov and Boris Yegorov, the first doctor in space. Feoktistov and Yegorov were the first two civilians in space. The flight lasted one day and served both as an engineering test and as a way to demonstrate the USSR’s scientific superiority over the United States, whose National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was planning to launch its new Gemini craft 15 days later.

After his flight, Feoktistov played a major role in designing the Salyut space stations, the Soyuz transport ships, and the unmanned Progress supply ships used to bring materials to the Soviet space stations. In 1980 he trained for his second spaceflight but had to drop out for health reasons. Although he did not fly again, Feoktistov continued to be active in the Russian space program as an engineer.