Russia's Cosmonauts

Offers a discussion on how Russia prepares its cosmonauts for spaceflight. This title contains interviews and photographs with information obtained by the authors on visits to Star City. In many ways, other than getting men onto the surface of the Moon, the Russian space program was more successful than the American manned space program. Cosmonauts logged many more hours in space, were supported by a complex and extensive network of ground crews, and had state-of-the-art training facilities at the Gagarin Training Center, located at Zvezdny Gorodok (Star City) outside of Moscow and named after Yuri Gagarin (first Russian in space), which includes equipment for simulating missions aboard Soyuz and the Russian modules of the International Space Station. The Center also has a neutral buoyancy facility similar to that at the Marshall Space Flight Center. This is the first book to offer an inside look at the remarkable training and accomplishments of the Soviet Union's cosmonauts.