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:
“As for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but ... the nine Muses and the three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase. Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)