Valentin Bondarenko

Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko ("Russian" Валентин Васильевич Бондаренко, b. February 16, 1937 in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR; d. March 23, 1961 in Moscow, USSR) was a Soviet fighter pilot and cosmonaut with a Ukrainian background. He died during a training accident in 1961. A crater on the Moon's far side is named for him.

Education and military training

Bondarenko's father was a furrier and was sent to the Eastern Front in the first days of World War II. The youngster and his mother went through several years of privation during the 1941-44 German occupation of the Ukraine. Later, while still at Kharkov's Higher Air Force School, he was a member of the local aviation club. [http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/cosmonauts/english/bondarenko_valentin.htm Space Facts website] ] After Bondarenko's graduation in 1954 he was admitted to the Voroshilov Aviation Military Academy and later transferred to the Armavir Military Pilot Aviation School, from which he graduated in 1957.

Commissioned a Second Lieutenant, Bondarenko served in the Soviet Air Force's PribVO (the former Baltic Military District), and on April 28, 1960 he was chosen to be among the first group of 29 cosmonauts. He began training on May 31 for an intended launch on the spacecraft Vostok 1 (aboard which Yuri Gagarin carried out the first human spaceflight a year later).

Circumstances of death

On March 23, 1961, on the tenth day of a 15-day endurance experiment in a pressure chamber at the Institute for Biomedical Studies in Moscow, [http://www.astronautix.com/astros/bonrenko.htm "Bondarenko Chronology"] , "Encyclopedia Astronautica"] Bondarenko, having completed work for the day, removed some monitoring biosensors from his body and washed his skin with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball, which he then carelessly threw away. The cotton ball landed on an electric hot plate, which started a flash fire in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, igniting Bondarenko's woolen suit.

Because of the pressure difference, it took a watching doctor nearly half an hour to open the chamber door. Bondarenko's suit burned until almost all the oxygen in the pressure chamber was used up and he had suffered third-degree burns over most of his body. The attending physician at Botkina Hospital, surgeon and traumatologist Vladimir Golyakhovsky, recalled in 1984 that while attempting to start an intravenous drip the only blood vessels he could find for inserting a needle were on the soles of Bondarenko's feet, where his flight boots had warded off the flames. According to Golyakhovsky, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent several hours at the hospital as "deathwatch officer", and Bondarenko died of shock 16 hours after the mishap, less than three weeks before Gagarin's historic spaceflight.Oberg, James, [http://www.jamesoberg.com/usd10.html "Uncovering Soviet Disasters"] , Chapter 10: "Dead Cosmonauts", pp 156-176, Random House, New York, 1988, retrieved 8 January 2008] Manned orbital flight program director Nikolai Kamanin blamed Bondarenko's death on the Institute's poor organisation and control of the experiment.

Bondarenko is buried in Lipovaya Roshcha in Novosibirsk, where his parents were then living. After his death Bondarenko's wife Anya left her job at the Cosmonaut Training Centre. His only child Aleksandr also later became a fighter pilot. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded him the Order of the Red Star on June 17, 1961.

Government deception

News of Bondarenko's accident and death was not published at the time. Bondarenko had already appeared in group films and photos of the first cosmonaut group, and his unexplained disappearance sparked rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches. In 1980 the details of this incident were at last published in the West, and in 1986 Izvestia published an article by science writer Yaroslav Golovanov, detailing the incident for Russian readers.

James Oberg, in his book "Red Star in Orbit", wrote how the Soviet government made an Orwellian attempt to airbrush 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. Clumsy attempts were later made to further "doctor" the historic photographs, with the insertion of imaginative but nonexistent photo details to account for the absence of the original members of the group.

The circumstances of Bondarenko's death were similar to those which befell the crew of "Apollo 1". There was some later speculation that, had the Soviets been open about the Bondarenko tragedy, NASA might have been alerted to the hazardous design of the early Apollo command module and would have made changes which could have prevented the 1967 deaths of the three "Apollo 1" crew members. [Charles, John, [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/797/1 "Could the CIA have prevented the Apollo 1 fire?] ", "Space Review," 29 January 2007, retrieved 5 January 2008] However, by 1966 the lethal hazards of a high-pressure 100-percent-oxygen environment had been thoroughly described in American scientific publications. [NASA History, " [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch18-2.html SP-4204, Predictions of Trouble] "]

References

External links

* [http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/cosmonauts/english/bondarenko_valentin.htm Cosmonaut biography for Valentin Bondarenko]
*Yaroslav Golovanov, [http://epizodsspace.testpilot.ru/bibl/golovanov/kosm-1/obl-k1.html "Cosmonaut No. 1"] (in Russian)
*James Oberg, [http://www.jamesoberg.com/usd10.html "Dead Cosmonauts"] , chapter 10 of "Uncovering Soviet Disasters"] , (Random House, New York, 1988) contains a detailed account of his attempts to uncover the facts concerning actual and alleged deaths in the Soviet space program.