Space physiologist; director of the IBMP
7 entries from the Secret Dawn - Among the Stars archive, 6 of them events in Gazenko's own life.
Oleg Gazenko is born in Stavropol Krai; he trains as a physician and physiologist, drawn to the frontier of the body under extreme stress.
Dezik and Tsygan ride an R-1V rocket to about 110 km and parachute back alive, the first mammals recovered from a space-altitude flight, the beginning of Soviet space medicine.
Gazenko works on the early dog flight programme, which recovers the first mammals from space altitude, the practical birth of Soviet space medicine.
Gazenko helps select and train Laika for Sputnik 2. He carries the ethical weight of the one-way flight for the rest of his life, quoted in 1998 as saying the mission had not been worth the death of the dog.
As head of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, Gazenko oversees Soviet space medicine at its height: the physiology of long flights, radiation, life support, and the psychology of confinement.
Under Gazenko the institute develops the exercise regimes, loading suits and monitoring that let cosmonauts survive missions of months and then a year, the science beneath every endurance record.
Gazenko dies in Moscow, remembered as the physician who made living in space survivable.
The research file for this dossier holds 7 verified source entries, 7 of them distinct works. The sources page lists every one of them with what it covers, how it was reached, and the sharpest point at which this page and its sources come apart.