75 years since the birth of Leonid Kadenyuk

January 28 marked the 75th anniversary of the birth of Ukraine's only cosmonaut, Leonid Kadenyuk.

He was born in 1951 in the village of Klishkivtsi, Khotyn district, Chernivtsi region. His parents worked as village teachers and wanted their son to become a doctor. However, he chose a completely different path. After graduating from high school with a silver medal, Leonid enrolled in the Chernihiv Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots, which trained fighter pilots.

In 1971, Kadenyuk received a pilot-engineer diploma and remained at his alma mater as an instructor. Five years later, he passed a rigorous competition to join the Soviet cosmonaut corps, during which only nine out of 9,000 applicants were selected. Leonid was assigned to a group preparing for flights on reusable air-space vehicles.

In subsequent years, Kadenyuk qualified as a test pilot and test cosmonaut. In particular, he served at the State Scientific and Testing Institute of the USSR Air Force. From 1984, he was involved in testing for the Buran reusable spacecraft program. Among other things, he participated in the development of the glide path and landing approach for Buran on MiG-31 and MiG-25 aircraft. In 1990-1992, he trained as commander of the Soyuz-TM spacecraft.

After the collapse of the USSR, Kadenyuk had good career prospects in Russia, but decided to serve in his homeland. In June 1995, he was selected for the group of cosmonauts of the National Space Agency of Ukraine. After reaching intergovernmental agreements on the flight of a Ukrainian citizen on an American spacecraft, preparations for the flight began at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. It lasted over a year.

From November 19 to December 5, 1997, Leonid Kadenyuk flew on the space shuttle Columbia as part of a crew that included four Americans and one Japanese. Each of them had their own task. The Ukrainian representative conducted biological research and experiments with plants, as well as research on the topic of “Humans and Weightlessness.”

After his space flight, Kadenyuk continued his service in Ukraine. In particular, he held the position of Chief of Aviation of the Air Defense Forces. Since 1998, he has been a Major General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. From 2002 to 2006, he was a People's Deputy of Ukraine in the Verkhovna Rada of the IV convocation.

On January 31, 2018, Leonid Kadenyuk died suddenly of a heart attack during his traditional morning run near his home in Kyiv.