Personal: Male. Reported killed together with a second crew member in an attempt to reach the moon ahead of the Americans in early 1969.

Astronaut Career

Astronaut Group: Phantom Cosmonaut.

A story made the rounds of ESA in 2000 of two Russian cosmonauts that died in an attempt to reach the moon in their spacecraft (1969). They were supposed to land on the moon, but due to some system malfunction they failed to get into lunar orbit and therfore passed the moon.

The source of this story was undoubtedly the television series 'The Cape'. The episode 'Buried in Peace' first aired on 28 October 1996. In the story, a shuttle crew on a mission to repair a communications satellite encounters a derelict Soviet spacecraft with a dead crew - the result of a secret attempt to send a manned mission to the moon 30 years earlier, and before the United States. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan in the story.