Konstantin Feoktistov

There was a time when no one in the U.S. would have had anything nice to say about Konstantin Feoktistov except maybe that he wasn't a communist. Feoktistov, who died on Nov. 21 at age 83, was part of that cursed group of Soviet cosmonauts who had a troubling habit of beating the Americans to all the great milestones in space: Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth before John Glenn; Alexei Leonov walked in space before Ed White. And Feoktistov, along with two compatriots, was part of the first group spaceflight, piloting the Voskhod 1 when it rocketed into orbit on Oct. 12, 1964. America's two-man Gemini spacecraft did not launch until the following March.

Feoktistov was different from other Soviet flyboys. For one thing, he was an egghead, a prominent spacecraft designer who also had the guts to fly the technology he helped develop. For another, he snubbed the Communist Party--professional suicide in the U.S.S.R. "I had many enemies who did not want me to make that flight," he famously told the Boston Globe in a 1998 interview. "Once we took off, I remember thinking, That's it. No one can get me off this spaceship now!"

Feoktistov stayed with the Soviet space program after his return to Earth, helping to design its later fleet of ships, including the elegant Mir space station. Like only a handful of other cosmonauts and astronauts, he lived to see a crater on the moon bear his name. And like too many of them--the Deke Slaytons and Gus Grissoms and Wally Schirras and others--he now passes into celestial memory.