Titov, Gherman Stepanovich

Gherman Stepanovich Titov, (born September 11, 1935, Verkhneye Zhilino, near Barnaul, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died September 20, 2000, Moscow), Soviet cosmonaut who piloted the Vostok 2 spacecraft, launched on August 6, 1961, on the first manned spaceflight of more than a single orbit; Yury Gagarin had made the first orbit of Earth on April 12, 1961.

Titov was accepted in 1953 for aviation cadet training, graduating in 1957 as a jet fighter pilot from the Stalingrad Flying Academy. In 1960 he entered cosmonaut training, during the course of which he received the Order of Lenin for an engineering proposal and was selected as the back-up cosmonaut to Gagarin for Vostok 1.

During the Vostok 2 flight of 25 hours 18 minutes, Titov was assigned the communications code name Eagle. His radio identification, “I am Eagle!,” was spoken with intense excitement and made an impression on listeners around the world. Following his flight Titov was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and received another Order of Lenin. In 1962 he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, a position that he held until 1970, and in 1968 he graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. Titov became a major general in 1975. In subsequent years he worked as an assistant to the chief editor of the Journal of Aviation and Cosmonautics. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Titov entered politics and was elected to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, in 1995; he did not run for a second term in 1999. His writings in English translation include I Am Eagle (1962) and Seventeen Cosmic Dawns (1963).