Valentin Bondarenko Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko ( , , 16 February 1937 - 23 March 1961 ) was a Soviet fighter pilot who trained to become a cosmonaut . He died during a training accident in Moscow , USSR , in 1961 . A crater on the Moon ' s far side is named for him . Education and military training . Bondarenko was born in Kharkiv , Ukrainian SSR , USSR . His father was sent to the Eastern Front in the first days of World War II . The youngster and his mother went through several years of privation during the time from 1941 – 1944 . From an early age , Bondarenko was fascinated by aviation heroes and dreamed of becoming a military aviator himself . While still at Kharkiv ' s Higher Air Force School , he was a member of the local aviation club . After Bondarenko ' s graduation in 1954 he was admitted to the Voroshilov Aviation Military Academy and a year later he was transferred to an air force college in Grozny , Armavir Military Pilot Aviation School , from which he graduated in 1957 . In 1956 he married Galina Semenovna Rykova , a medical worker . Their first child was born later that year . During 1956 , Bondarenko was sent to Armavir Higher Air Force Pilots School , graduating in 1957 — the same year Sputnik 1 was launched . Commissioned a Second Lieutenant Bondarenko served in the Soviet Air Force ' s PribVO ( the former Baltic Military District ) and on 28 April 1960 he was chosen to be among the first group of 29 cosmonauts . Bondarenko , " ( also known as ' Valentin Junior ' and ' Tinkerbell ' ) was the youngest member of the cosmonaut team . " He began training on 31 May for a planned launch on the spacecraft Vostok 1 ( aboard which Yuri Gagarin carried out the first human spaceflight a year later ) . According to his fellow cosmonauts , Bondarenko was a mild - mannered person with a pleasant disposition . He had a good singing voice and played tennis well . Death . 23 March 1961 was the tenth day of a 15 - day endurance experiment in a low pressure altitude chamber at the Institute for Biomedical Studies in Moscow . The chamber ' s atmosphere was at least 50 % oxygen . Bondarenko , having completed work for the day , removed some monitoring biosensors from his body and washed his skin with an alcohol - soaked cotton ball , which he then carelessly threw away . The cotton ball landed on an electric hot plate which he was using to brew a cup of tea . The cotton ignited and Bondarenko tried to smother the flames with the sleeve of his wool en coveralls , which caught on fire in the chamber ' s oxygen - rich atmosphere . Because of the pressure difference , it took a watching doctor nearly half an hour to open the chamber door . Bondarenko ' s clothing burned until almost all the oxygen in the chamber was used up and he had suffered third - degree burn s over most of his body . The attending physician at Botkin Hospital , surgeon and traumatologist Vladimir Golyakhovsky , recalled in 1984 that while attempting to start an intravenous drip , the only blood vessels he could find for inserting a needle were on the soles of Bondarenko ' s feet , where his flight boots had warded off the flames . According to Golyakhovsky , cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent several hours at the hospital as " deathwatch officer " and Bondarenko died of shock 16 hours after the accident , less than three weeks before Gagarin ' s historic spaceflight . Manned orbital flight program director Nikolai Kamanin blamed Bondarenko ' s death on the Institute ' s poor organisation and control of the experiment . Bondarenko was buried in Lipovaya Roshcha in Kharkiv , where his parents were then living . On 17 June 1961 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded Bondarenko the Order of the Red Star . After his death Bondarenko ' s young wife Anya stayed on for a time at the cosmonaut centre in an undisclosed job . Bondarenko ' s only child Aleksandr ( Sasha ) was five years old when his father died and later became an air force officer . Aftermath . News of Bondarenko ' s accident and death was not published at the time . Bondarenko had already appeared in group films and photos of the first cosmonaut group , and his unexplained disappearance sparked rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches . In 1980 the details of this incident were at last published in the West , and in 1986 " Izvestia " published an article by science writer Yaroslav Golovanov , detailing the incident for Soviet readers . James Oberg , in his book " Red Star in Orbit " , wrote how the Soviet government airbrushed out the cosmonaut ' s image from an official 1961 photograph of the first six cosmonauts selected for training , while British researcher Rex Hall showed that five people had been erased from an earlier group photograph of 16 cosmonauts . Clumsy attempts were later made to further doctor the historic photographs , with the insertion of imaginative but nonexistent photo details to account for the absence of the original members of the group . Bondarenko ' s death was caused by fire in a sealed , high - oxygen environment , which also befell the crew of " Apollo 1 " . There was some later speculation that , had the Soviets been open about the Bondarenko tragedy , NASA might have been alerted to the hazardous design of the early Apollo command module and would have made changes which could have prevented the 1967 deaths of the three " Apollo 1 " crew members . However , by 1966 the lethal hazards of a high - pressure 100 - percent - oxygen environment such as Apollo 1 ' s had been thoroughly described in American scientific publications . Books . An account of Bondarenko ' s life appears in the 2003 book " Fallen Astronauts " by Colin Burgess .