Pavel Popovich

Pavel Popovich was a Soviet cosmonaut who piloted the Vostok 4 spacecraft, launched on August 12, 1962. He and Andriyan G. Nikolayev, who was launched a day earlier in Vostok 3, became the first two men to be in space simultaneously. The two spacecraft came within 5 km of each other. Vostok 4 landed on August 15, 1962. Popovich was also the commander of the Soyuz 14 mission, on which he was accompanied by flight engineer Yury P. Artyukhin. The cosmonauts docked their craft with Salyut 3, a military space station that had been placed in orbit on June 25, and engaged in a 15-day program of reconnaissance of Earth's surface. Popovich was a herdsman in his early youth, graduated from a technical school in Magnitogorsk, Russia, U.S.S.R., in 1951, when he entered the army. He quickly transferred to the air force and in 1954 graduated from the Stalingrad Air Force College. He became a pilot, and in 1960 he was among the first to enter cosmonaut training. He was a keen weightlifter and a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. After his retirement in 1993, Popovich lived in Moscow. Popovich died in a hospital in Gurzuf where he was taken following a stroke on 29 September 2009.