Oleg Kononenko

Oleg Grigoriyevich Kononenko (16 August 1938 – 8 September 1980) was a member of Soviet cosmonaut group LII-1. He was born in the village of Samarskoye, in Rostov, Russia, then part of the Soviet Union. He graduated from Zhukovsky Air Force Institute in 1975. On 12 July 1977, he was selected for cosmonaut training as a pilot of the Buran space shuttle. He survived an aircraft ejection on the Soviet aircraft carrier Minsk on 27 December 1979. Kononenko was married three times and had four children.

The crew of the aircraft carrier, from which he had taken off, immediately managed to recover his body. The ship then went to the city of Vladivostok, where Kononenko's body was left, and was later taken to Moscow, where he was buried with all honors.

Kononenko posthumously received the Order of Lenin medal (his second), but he was never officially considered a cosmonaut, as he died just a few months from the completion of basic training, which would give him this title.

Subsequent cosmonaut fatalities Less than two months after Kononenko's death, another Soviet cosmonaut lost his life in a plane crash. This time, the victim was Leonid Ivanov, who died in an accident with a Mig-23 jet.

On 9 September 1990, exactly ten years and one day after Kononenko's death, Rimantas Stankevičius, another Soviet cosmonaut, also died in an accident, during a performance at an air show in Italy.

Namesakes In 1996, Russia selected another cosmonaut, whose name, oddly enough, was also Oleg Kononenko. This one was called Oleg Dmitriyevich Kononenko. He participated in his first space mission together with the cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, having spent a season aboard the International Space Station.

This was not even the first occasion, when two namesake cosmonauts were chosen as such. Previously, a Russian cosmonaut named Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov and a cosmonaut from Bulgaria named Aleksandr Panayotov Aleksandrov had previously gone up into space.