Roscosmos Cosmonaut Corps
The Roscosmos Cosmonaut Corps (in Russian: "Отряд космонавтов", simply The Cosmonauts Corps) is a unit of the Russia's Roscosmos State Corporation that selects, trains, and provides astronauts as crew members for the Russian Federation and international space missions. It is part of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, based at Star City in Moscow Oblast, Russia. History. The development of Soviet science and technology made it possible, by the end of the 1950s, to consider the issues of manned space flight. At the beginning of 1959, the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Mstislav Keldysh  held a meeting at which questions about manned space flight were discussed specifically, right down to "who should fly?". The decision on the selection and training of astronauts for the first space flight on the spacecraft "Vostok" was made in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 22-10 "On the medical selection of candidates for astronauts", dated January 5, 1959, and in the Resolution Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 569-264 "On the preparation of man for space flights", May 22, 1959. The selection of  candidates for cosmonauts corps was entrusted to the command of the Air Force of the Armed Forces, military doctors and medical flight commissions, which monitored the health of pilots in units and formations, and the training of future cosmonauts was entrusted to the Air Force of the Armed Forces of the USSR. Later, the selection was directly entrusted to a group of specialists from the Central Military Research Aviation Hospital (TsVNIAH). The cosmonaut corps was formed on January 11, 1960 by the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of the USSR, dated  March 7, 1960, the first 12 pilots who passed the initial selection were appointed to the post of listener-cosmonauts of the Air Force; The first cosmonaut corps, which included the future first cosmonaut of Yuri Gagarin, consisted of twenty people. On March 23, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was appointed as the commander of the cosmonaut corps. The first Cosmonauts Corps was military unit No. 26266, which formed with the task of training cosmonauts, and a little later it was transformed into the Cosmonaut Training Center of the Air Force of the Armed Forces. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the Corps became partly civilian and was managed by the Russian Space and Aviation Agency (RKA). Organization. The cosmonaut Corps is based at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, although members may be assigned to other locations based on mission requirements. The Chief of the Cosmonaut Office is the most senior leadership position for active cosmonaut in the Corps. The Chief serves as head of the Corps and is the principal adviser to the Roscosmos Director-General on cosmonaut training and operations. The first Chief Astronaut was Yuri Gagarin, appointed in 1960. The current Chief is  Maksim Kharlamov. Requirements. In order to enter the cosmonaut corps, a candidate for the role of an space pilot must pass medical and psychological tests (in the Central Research Aviation Hospital), as well as undergo a face-to-face interview. During Soviet Union, in addition, membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was also a prerequisite for joining the cosmonaut corps. The main current requirements for joining the cosmonaut corps are to be with Russian citizenship, age up to 35 years, higher education, knowledge of English, successful passing of medical and psychological tests, body weight up to 90  kilograms. List of Cosmonauts. Russia and the Soviet Union. Soviet and Russian cosmonauts born outside Russia. All of the locations below were part of the former U.S.S.R. at the time of the cosmonauts' birth.