Car crashes, curses, and carousing—the story of the second Soviet in space

(via Ars Technica) The recklessness and bravado of the first seven Mercury astronauts are immortalized in the 1979 Tom Wolfe book (and 1983 film) The Right Stuff. You’d think the Soviet space program wouldn’t have tolerated such misbehavior—early cosmonauts were supposed to represent the superiority of the Communist system, after all—but you’d be wrong. And this reality is best understood through the story of Gherman Stepanovich Titov, the Soviet Union’s second man in space.  Ars Technica has the full story on this pint- sized (he was only 5’4″ tall) bundle of spaceflight history.