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Soviet cosmonaut
Grigory Nelyubov
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![](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/74/Grigory_Grigoryevich_Nelyubov.jpg/220px-Grigory_Grigoryevich_Nelyubov.jpg) Nelyubov in 1960
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Born
| (
1934-03-31
)
31 March 1934
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Died
| 18 February 1966
(1966-02-18)
(aged 31)
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Space career
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Missions
| None
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Grigory Grigoryevich Nelyubov
(
Russian
:
Григо?рий Григо?рьевич Нелю?бов
; 31 March 1934 – 18 February 1966) was one of the original 20 Soviet
cosmonauts
, who was dismissed from the
Soviet space program
in 1963 for drunk and disorderly conduct. His existence in the program was kept secret until the advent of Soviet
glasnost
in the late 1980s. He killed himself on 18 February 1966.
Born in the village of
Porfiryevka
[
ru
]
,
Crimea
in
USSR
, Nelyubov was a captain and pilot in the
Soviet Air Force
. He was selected as one of the original 20 cosmonauts on 7 March 1960 along with
Yuri Gagarin
. The following year, six of the original twenty were evaluated for assignment on Vostok flight crews between January 17 and 18; Gagarin,
Titov
, and Nelyubov were considered the top three candidates.
[1]
[2]
For
Vostok 1
Nelyubov was chosen as second backup for Gagarin and presumably first backup for
Vostok 2
for Titov in April and August 1961 respectively. For the dual launches of
Vostok 3
and
Vostok 4
, Nelyubov was again chosen as a backup for
Andrian Nikolayev
and
Pavel Popovich
.
On 27 March 1963, Nelyubov,
Ivan Anikeyev
and
Valentin Filatyev
resisted while being arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct by the military security patrol (комендатура) at Chkalovskaya station. According to reports, the duty officer agreed to ignore the whole incident and not send the report if Nelyubov apologized, but he refused, and the matter was reported to the authorities. Because there were previous incidents, all three were dismissed from the cosmonaut corps on 17 April 1963, though officially not until 4 May 1963.
Pavel Popovich
, secretary of the party organization, tried to resolve the situation by calling a party meeting where Nelyubov was once again invited to apologize to the patrol chief and to the other cosmonauts, but he again refused. He was dismissed, never having completed a space mission.
[3]
Following dismissal he went back to flying
interceptors
in the
Far East
but fell to drinking and
depression
. He died on February 18, 1966. While drunk, he stepped in front of a train near the
Ippolitovka
station of the
Far Eastern Railway
, northwest of
Vladivostok
.
[4]
It was officially ruled a suicide. To protect the image of the space program, efforts were made to cover up the reason for Nelyubov's dismissal and his following suicide. His image was
airbrushed out
of the "Sochi Six" photo which showed the top members of the original class of Soviet cosmonauts. This airbrushing led to speculation about "
lost cosmonauts
".
[
citation needed
]
In 2007, an award-winning TV documentary
about him
[
ru
]
was released.
[5]
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]