Obituaries : Alexander Levchenko, 47; Recent Soviet Cosmonaut

Cosmonaut Alexander Levchenko, who last year flew a historic mission that ferried Soviet spacemen to and from the space station Mir, has died “after a grave illness,” the official news agency Tass said Tuesday. Tass said he was 47 and did not elaborate on the cause of death.

Levchenko was in space in December for nine days during the complex flight that brought record holder Yuri Romanenko, 43, back from his record 327 days in orbit aboard the Mir.

In that cosmonaut swap, Levchenko blasted off aboard a space capsule, the Soyuz TM-4, on Dec. 21, with cosmonauts Vladimir Titov, 40, and Musa Manarov, 36, as the replacement crew for Romanenko and Alexander Alexandrov, 40.

Although Levchenko was an experienced test pilot, the December delivery mission was his first in space.

The mission apparently did not go easily--both in the docking of the space capsule with the space station and the return landing.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said on Dec. 25 that the spaceship delivery vehicle did not initially attain its planned orbit.

That was corrected by the time of the docking, and the crews for the space station were exchanged. Levchenko safely brought back the two cosmonauts after leaving two fresh ones aboard the Mir in what Radio Moscow called a “small step” toward a manned mission to Mars.

But on landing in the south of Kazakhstan, strong winds blew the landing capsule on its side.

Levchenko confessed to a “momentary weakness” after being helped from the space capsule. “But then, I had spent the previous 15 minutes on my head,” he said.

Most recently, Western sources said, Levchenko and Igor Walk, another senior test pilot and cosmonaut, had reportedly conducted tests on a Soviet space shuttle. In March, a senior space official said the Soviet shuttle would fly in “the nearest future.”