Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut... Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin’s famous space flight, reported Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located at Khimki, in the Moscow region). According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls had been launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959.
