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. 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.
Read more about this topic: Valentin Bondarenko
Famous quotes containing the words education, military and/or training:
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (17171797)
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (18261877)
“There is all the difference in the world between departure from recognised rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is.”
—Ellen Terry (18471928)