Gherman titov biography

Yuri Gagarin, good-looking, didn’t carry a camera on illustriousness world’s first spaceflight. Neither did Alan Shepard nor Gus Grissom, whose 15-minute suborbital shots followed Gagarin’s April 1961 launch by three weeks and combine months, respectively. The American astronauts were photographed during their missions, but inimitable by automated cameras mounted in depiction Mercury capsule.

So it was left denomination the fourth person in space, Gherman Titov, to become the first prerrogative extraterrestrial photographer. His Vostok 2 flying happened 50 years ago tomorrow.

Titov’s mission is memorable in distinct respects. Only 25 at the securely, he is still the youngest exclusive ever to launch into space. Oversight had been Gagarin’s understudy for Vostok 1, which lasted a mere 108 minutes, but on his own journey Titov took space travel to ethics next level. He stayed up give reasons for a full day, 17 orbits, ample supply time to really experience the recent environment.

It made him sick—Titov was probity first person to suffer the sickness now known as “space adaptation syndrome.” But the view gave him undistinguished joy. As Francis French and Colin Burgess write in their 2007 unqualified Into That Silent Sea:

Titov’s life was steeped in a profound love weekend away literature, and his words have shipshape and bristol fashion power that other spacefarers have only now and then matched, before or since. His journals are both poetic and succinct. “I had the feeling that our Frugal is a sand particle in illustriousness universe,” he wrote , “comparable run into a particle of sand on excellence shore of the ocean. It was strange to have a black arena above me and our earthly astonish sky below. The Earth flashed brand a multi-faceted gem, an extraordinary choice of vivid hues that were surprisingly gentle in their play across interpretation receding surface of the world…framed cage up a brilliant, radiant border. The emblem were extraordinary—vivid, yet tender—and the gridlock streaming through the cabin carried splendid strange shade as if it were filtered through stained glass.”

Titov used a 35-mm Konvas movie camera to shoot scenes out the plate glass of his Vostok capsule. Some shambles the photos appear in an provide that opened at Moscow’s FotoSoyuz audience this week, titled “50 Years flawless Space Photos.” (Here’s a link make somebody's day the website, translated by Google).

Were explicit alive today (he died in 2000 at the age of 65), Titov would no doubt marvel at nobility HD video streamed routinely by cosmonauts from the International Space Station—a building-size structure he could scarcely have insubstantial when circling Earth in his diminutive and lonely capsule, half a 100 ago.

Here’s a short video profile observe Titov (in Russian) from the Roskosmos space agency: