Yuri Titov

Gherman Titov was born into the family of a teacher, an admirer of Pushkin, in the Altai Territory, in Siberia. His father called his children after Pushkin's characters, - Zemfira and Gherman. When the cosmonauts' team was being set up in the late 1950s, Titov became one of the chosen 20. Only six of the twenty, who proved the strongest and withstanding overloads better, were approved for space missions. But the best of the best were Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. The two were neck and neck throughout the trials. Gagarin was older and more experienced, but Titov was three kilos lighter, which was quite important at the time. It was very difficult to choose between the two. Gagarin won Chief Spacecraft Designer Sergei Korolev's heart by his famous smile, but it was the name that turned out to be the decisive factor. The Soviet spaceflight pioneer could not have a foreign name. The Russian name Yuri was an altogether different matter.