On November 19, 1997, the Columbia spacecraft took off with six people on board. Among them was the first astronaut of independent Ukraine. His journey into space turned out to be extremely difficult and long. It lasted 36 years.
Pilot from Ukraine
Leonid Kadenyuk was the first astronaut of independent Ukraine. He flew into space from November 19 to December 5, 1997, aboard the American shuttle Columbia. He took the Ukrainian flag and a CD of songs by the band Vopli Vidopliassova with him on board. It may seem that this flight was an easy achievement for the Ukrainian space industry and for Kadenyuk personally, but in reality, this was not the case.
On January 28, 1951, a rural teacher from the village of Klyshkivtsi in the Khotyn raion of the Chernivtsi region gave birth to twins. The boys were named Leonid and Serhii. When they were 10 years old, the first human flight into space took place. Leonid heard about it on the radio and decided that he, too, would become a cosmonaut.
Leonid’s mother did not share his aspirations and wanted him to become a doctor. However, the young man was determined to fly into space, so he combined his studies with sports. He graduated from school with a silver medal.
However, it is not so easy to get into space from a village in Bukovina. The first step was the military pilot school in Chernihiv. Leonid Kadenyuk graduated from it in 1971 and stayed there as an instructor. He married a local girl, and later they had a son.
Buran programme
Five years passed before he had the opportunity to take the next step. The US was working on the Space Shuttle, a reusable spacecraft, and the Soviet Union, as always, decided to “catch up and overtake.”
Work on the “shuttle” was just beginning, but the search for pilots who, after a long stay in weightlessness, would be able to land it at an airfield like an airplane was already underway. About 3,000 candidates were found at all Soviet air bases. They were subjected to tests that bordered on torture, and a group was selected, which included Kadenyuk.
He had to move with his wife to Star City near Moscow. There, Kadenyuk first underwent general space training, then test pilot training, and finally became a test cosmonaut.
Meanwhile, the Soviet shuttle Buran was still not ready, and the team prepared by conducting risky flights on high-altitude MiG-25 and MiG-31 interceptors, which were similar in characteristics.
It seemed that space flight was just around the corner, but Kadenyuk’s marriage fell apart, and he divorced his wife in 1983. For some reason, the Soviet leadership did not like it when cosmonauts were not model family men. And Kadenyuk dared to declare that his earthly life had nothing to do with space.
So he was not only excluded from the Buran pilot group, but also sent to serve at a completely unprestigious airfield in Lipetsk. However, he was able to quickly transfer to the test aviation center in the city of Akhtubinsk (where his second wife’s father was the boss) and became a test pilot there. His dream of flying into space was once again postponed indefinitely.
And the experiments there were sometimes very strange. For example, they sprayed an airplane with a radioactive substance, and the pilot had to fly it. At the same time, Kondratyuk studied at the Moscow Aviation Institute, where he received a degree in aviation engineering and mechanics.
In 1988, Kadenyuk was reinstated to the group of cosmonauts who were to pilot the Buran. On November 15 of that year, the Soviet shuttle made its first launch, which took place in automatic mode. It was time to carry out a manned flight.
The first Ukrainian astronaut
At that time, Kadenyuk was already a colonel in the Air Force and was 37 years old, but he was still studying. In December 1991, he was scheduled to fly into space on the Soyuz spacecraft, and then, in 1993, to lead the crew during the second manned launch of the Buran.
However, in August 1991, Ukraine declared its independence, and in December, the USSR ceased to exist.
Kadenyuk’s flight into space could be forgotten. Russia did not even have the opportunity to take him from the Mir station. A couple of years later, it became clear that these problems would last for a long time and that there would be no Buran flights. The group of pilots was disbanded. Kadenyuk found himself back in the position of test pilot, and he did not have long to go before retirement.
Then Kadenyuk got incredibly lucky. In 1994, during a visit to the United States, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma agreed to send a Ukrainian astronaut on the Space Shuttle. In the past, he was the head of Ukraine’s largest rocket manufacturing company, Pivdenmash, and since the last years of the Soviet Union, he had wanted to launch an all-Ukrainian crew into space.
The problem was that Ukraine simply did not have any trained astronauts. However, there was Kadenyuk in Moscow, who, although he had been living in Russia for 20 years at that point, still remembered that he was Ukrainian. For the sake of space flight, he renounced his Russian citizenship and accepted Ukrainian citizenship.
At the same time, a Ukrainian astronaut team was formed, but it was clear to everyone that Kadenyuk was the only real candidate. In 1996, he moved to the United States, where he completed the American astronaut training course.
Finally, on November 19, 1997, the STS-87 mission took off. In addition to Kadenyuk, there were four American astronauts and a Japanese astronaut, Takao Doi, on board. Leonid flew not as a pilot, but as a payload specialist. His main task was to conduct biological experiments developed by Ukrainian scientists.
However, his cosmic dream finally came true at the age of 46. It took him 36 years to achieve it! Nevertheless, Kadenyuk still achieved his goal, proving once again that there are no obstacles too difficult to overcome on the way to the stars and that you should never give up, even when it seems that the goal is unattainable.
