General Gherman Titov Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

Gherman Stepanovich Titov (11 September 1935 – 20 September 2000) was a Soviet cosmonaut who, on 6 August 1961, became the second human to orbit the Earth aboard Vostok 2, preceded by Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1. Titov was the fourth man in space after Gagarin and Americans Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom (the latter two made suborbital voyages).   Titov's flight finally proved that humans could live and work in space. He was the first person to orbit the Earth multiple times (a total of 17), to spend more than a day in space, to sleep in orbit and to suffer from space sickness. He was the first to pilot a spaceship personally and he made the first manual photographs from orbit, thus setting a record for modern space photography. A month short of 26 years old at launch, he remains the youngest person to fly in space.   In his subsequent life Titov continued to work for the Soviet space program, playing a major role in Spiral project where he trained to become the first pilot of an orbital spaceplane. However, after the death of Yuri Gagarin in a military aircraft accident in 1968 the Soviet government decided it couldn't afford to lose its second cosmonaut, and so Titov's career as test pilot ended.   Titov served in the Soviet Air Force and become General-Colonel, and in his final years in post-Soviet Russia he became a Communist politician.