Aleksandr Aleksandrov
He is the second Bulgarian to have flown to space behind Georgi Ivanov. Aleksandrov was born in Omurtag, Bulgaria on December 1, 1951. He graduated from the Bulgarian Air Force Academy in 1974 and obtained a degree in technical sciences in ...
Anatoli Levchenko
Anatoli Semyonovich Levchenko (Russian: Анатолий Семёнович Левченко; May 5, 1941 – August 6, 1988) was a Soviet cosmonaut. Levchenko was planned to be the back-up commander of the first Buran space shuttle flight, and in March 1987 he began ...
Musa Manarov
Musa Khiramanovich Manarov (Russian: Муса Хираманович Манаров; born March 22, 1951 in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR) is a former cosmonaut who spent 541 days in space. From December 21, 1987 to December 21, 1988 he flew as flight engineer on Soyuz TM-4. ...
Muhammed Faris
Syrian military aviator. He was the first Syrian and the second Arab in space. Born in Aleppo, Syria, he was a pilot in the Syrian Air Force with the rank of a colonel. He specialized in navigation when he was selected to participate in the ...
Aleksandr Viktorenko
Aleksandr Stepanovich Viktorenko (Александр Степанович Викторенко) was a Soviet cosmonaut. He was born in Olginka, North-Kazakhstan Oblast, Kazakh SSR on March 29, 1947. He is married with two children. He was selected as a cosmonaut on March ...
Aleksandr Laveykin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Laveykin (Russian: Александр Иванович Лавейкин; born April 21, 1951) is a retired Soviet cosmonaut. Born in Moscow, Laveykin was selected as a cosmonaut on December 1, 1978. He flew on one spaceflight, for the first part of ...
Robert Cenker
Mr. Cenker currently consults with various firms in the areas of spacecraft design, assembly, and flight operations, and micro-gravity research. This has included launch vehicle evaluation and systems engineering support for Motorola on Iridium; ...
Charles Bolden
Charles Frank Bolden Jr. is a former Administrator of NASA, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General, and a former NASA astronaut. A 1968 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he became a Marine Aviator and test pilot. After ...
Bryan O'Connor
PERSONAL DATA: Born September 6, 1946, in Orange, California, but considers Twentynine Palms, California, to be his hometown. Bryan and his wife, Susan, have two married sons, Thomas and Kevin, and three granddaughters, Ella, Riley and Colby. The ...
Wubbo Ockels
Dr Wubbo Johannes Ockels (28 March 1946 – 18 May 2014) was a Dutch physicist and an astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA). In 1985 he participated in a flight on the Space Shuttle Challenger, STS-61-A, making him the first Dutch citizen in ...
Ernst Messerschmid
Ernst Willi Messerschmid (born May 21, 1945) is a German physicist and former astronaut. From 1978 to 1982, he worked at the DFVLR (the precursor of the DLR) in the Institute of Communications Technology in Oberpfaffenhofen on space-borne ...
Reinhard Furrer
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Alfred Furrer (25 November 1940 – 9 September 1995) was a German physicist and astronaut. In 1977 Furrer applied for selection as an astronaut for the first Spacelab mission. He made it into the final round of candidates, ...
What is the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?
Cosmonaut and astronaut are synonyms, that is, theoretically we can use them interchangeably, but traditionally we call people launched into space by the Americans astronauts and by the Russians cosmonauts, regardless of what nationalities they were. That is, Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Italians, French and Germans flying with Americans are astronauts. In contrast, General Hermaszewski, the only (so far) Pole in Space, is called a cosmonaut because he flew as part of the Soviet space program.
