cosmonaut

Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s the same year Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to venture into space.

Under a contract between Nasa and Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, three-seat Russian Soyuz spacecraft carry one Nasa astronaut on each flight to the ISS and a cosmonaut flies on each four-seat Dragon.

A 59-year-old Russian cosmonaut has become the first person to spend 1,000 days in space, Russian space agency Roscosmos said Wednesday.

The first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, squeezed beef and liver paste into his mouth from an aluminum tube.

In the interview, he described how the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into outer space in 1961 — the first for a human and “the first major event of my life” — inspired him to write the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17.