Pioneering Soviet cosmonaut flew three dramatic missions

When Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth as the first man in space, Vladimir Shatalov, who has died aged 93, was convinced that his chance to become a cosmonaut had gone. As a senior pilot in the Soviet Union’s air force, Shatalov had just completed a routine flying mission from his base in Odessa on April 12, 1961, when he was told that Gagarin had successfully completed his mission. ‘‘Am I too late?’’ he asked a colleague. ‘‘Gagarin is seven years younger than me.’’

However, a year later, he was asked to nominate the five best pilots under his command for consideration as potential cosmonauts. Boldly, he put his own name at the top of the list, passed the medical examination and was interviewed by the cosmonaut selection panel, which included

Gagarin.

By 1963 he was in training as a cosmonaut. Six years later, by which time he was in his forties, he made his first space flight on Soyuz4. Launching from Kazakhstan on January 14, 1969, gale-force wind shook the rocket on its launch pad during the countdown and mission control asked him how the craft had withstood the tremor. ‘‘It quivers like a spirited horse ready for a race,’’ he replied.

It was a key moment in the history of space flight, for once Soyuz-4 was in orbit, Shatalov was to await the arrival of Soyuz-5, which launched a day later with three further cosmonauts on board. Intended as a dry run for the planned Soviet lunar landing programme, the two craft were to dock in space.

As Shatalov edged towards the other craft and inserted Soyuz-4’s metal probe into Soyuz5’s docking station, the Soviet mission command waited anxiously back on Earth. It was the first docking in orbit by two manned spacecraft, beating the Americans’ Apollo 9 mission to the feat by two months.

There was no internal connecting corridor between the two capsules and so another first was achieved when Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov, two of the crew members on Soyuz-5, left their craft and stepped into space, using the craft’s exterior handrails to enter Soyuz-4. It was the first crew transfer between two different spacecraft.

After he had helped them to remove their spacesuits, Shatalov bear-hugged his colleagues and he recalled ‘‘talking excitedly and not making much sense’’.

After his return Shatalov and his fellow cosmonauts joined the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in an open-topped motorcade through Moscow to the Kremlin. The honours Brezhnev bestowed on Shatalov defined the communist era as he was made a Hero of The Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin.

He is survived by his wife, Musa Andreyevna Ionova, and their two children.

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Shatalov was born in Petropavlovsk, in the Soviet socialist republic of Kazakhstan. His father, Aleksandr, was a railway engineer, and an early recipient of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal.

In 1930 the family moved to Leningrad, and Shatalov was 13 when the German army’s siege began in 1941. Father and son served in the same brigade defending the city.

After the war he trained as a military pilot and by the late 1950s he was a squadron commander with ambitions to fly even higher.

In total he made three trips into space, logging a total of nine days, 21 hours and 55 minutes orbiting the Earth. His third and final space flight came in April 1971 when he commanded a mission to the newly launched Salyut, the world’s first space station.

He hoped for further missions. However, at 43 he was considered too old and was assigned to the Cosmonaut Training Centre, rising to become its commander. To Shatalov’s disappointment there was never a Soviet lunar landing, but he had the small consolation of having a crater on the far side of the Moon named after him.

‘‘It quivers like a spirited horse ready for a race.’’ Vladimir Shatalov on his Soyuz-4 rocket