Future cosmonaut Titov Herman Stepanovich was born in September 1935 in a small village of the Altai Territory, in the family of a local school teacher. In 1953, the young man graduated from high school, and two years later - the Military Aviation School for the preliminary training of pilots in one of the towns of the Kazakh SSR. After graduating from a specialized school, he manages to enter the Stalingrad Military Aviation School. This college graduates in 1957. Here he gets the cherished qualification of a military pilot. After graduation, the future Soviet cosmonaut Titov is sent for distribution to military service in the aviation section of the Leningrad Military District. In Leningrad, he serves in the aviation fighter regiment. Actually, it is here that the brilliant flight biography of cosmonaut Titov Herman Stepanovich begins. Here he made more than eight hundred flights on airplanes of various designs, including novelties of that time- jet aircraft. This experience and a good track record in no small degree contributed to the fact that the young pilot in 1960 was included in the first set of Soviet cosmonauts. On January 25, 1961, he was officially appointed to this post, which existed in the Soviet Union. Astronaut Titov was originally considered an understudy of Yuri Gagarin, who was lucky enough to become the first elected of this space race. As you know, the first man was in space April 12, 1961. After the first successful attempt, the Soviet space program did not pull with the second launch, and German Titov, cosmonaut number two in world history, was sent into space on August 6, 1961. If Gagarin holds the honor of the first man to be outside the Earth's atmosphere, Herman Stepanovich made the first long-duration space flight in human history. He stayed in orbit for more than 25 hours and made about 17 turns on the Vostok-2 apparatus. All the radio stations in the world reported about the second person who happened to be in space!
Mature years of Herman Stepanovich
After this famous flight, the biography of the second cosmonaut of the USSR for many years was associated with aviation and space flights. Already in September 1961, cosmonaut Titov was sent to study at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy to acquire the specialty of a space engineer and further training. In the same September 1961 he was appointed an instructor-cosmonaut for subsequent sets of candidates for orbit. In 1968 he graduated from the academy and became already a senior instructor and in parallel commander of the second cosmonaut detachment. Four years later, Herman Titov became deputy head of the department for research and development work.
In this position, he is engaged in the design of residential and social areas of cosmodromes, as well as spacecraft themselves. Among other things, Titov participates in the development of a reusable spacecraft. In 1976, Herman Stepanovich holds a post in the state structure of the Ministry of Defense, which leaves only with the collapse of the country in 1991. Like many famous figures of the Soviet Union, German Titov in the mid-nineties is sent to politics, being elected to the State Duma in 1995 as an independent candidate. For some time he worked in the Committee on Transport, Construction and Industry. Since 1999, the former cosmonaut has become president of the Cosmonautics Federation. Even the last years of his life the indefatigable man spent in active service to his country. Titov Herman Stepanovich died in September 2000 from a heart attack.