A quiet man gets the spotlight in space

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

At the very end of his six-month sojourn in outer space, cosmonaut Valery Tokarev seemed to come out of his shell. By nature and reputation a very private person, the 53-year-old Russian cosmonaut maintained that privacy with a lighthearted jest.

A question from a reporter during this week's news conference seemed to delight him. What, he was asked, do you dream about in space?

The unexpected inquiry struck a chord in his soul. With a grin he took the microphone from his shipmate Bill McArthur, and answered with a tone of delight in his voice. “We slept well,” he explained, “and only sometimes dreamed.” Then he paused.

“I want to say I saw one beautiful dream, a color dream, and I don’t remember I [ever] saw it on the ground,” he explained. Then, suppressing a chuckle, he added, “I will not tell you who and what I saw.” The obvious intention was for the questioner to guess, and Tokarev was hinting that the answer should be obvious.

But there is little that is obvious about Valery Tokarev. Born within earshot of the first Soviet rockets headed for space, his teenage passion was for high-performance aircraft flight. His skills brought him through flight school and into the Red Air Force, where he became a leading test pilot. This led him into the Soviets' Buran shuttle program, which became a dead end.

When the program was canceled and the test pilot teams returned to military flight duties, Tokarev chose not to follow orders. Instead, he maneuvered his way into a neighboring office at the cosmonaut center, where he remained an active cosmonaut without a program — a senior test pilot out of step with the pilot-cosmonaut culture there. But as unexpected opportunities arose, he was primed to use them, both through luck and tenacity.

None of this is in any official biography. Nor is the high reputation he has earned from his Russian and American colleagues, a reputation that led NASA astronaut Ed Lu to bestow on him the greatest compliment a space pilot can use. "I'd fly to Mars with him," Lu told MSNBC.com,  attesting to his regard for Tokarev's technical skills as well as his cooperative personality fit for a years-long expedition.

At age 53, this kind of person does not turn from his crowning professional accomplishment, a six-month tour in space, to mere ceremonial duties. He will not willingly fade into retirement, but will rather seek new aerospace challenges. So it’s time the world got to know him better.

Behind the official bio
The official biography says Tokarev was born in a town called Kapyar, in the lower Volga River valley of Astrakhan Province. But there is no such town on any map of the Soviet Union, and a simple Internet search shows why: “Kapyar” is a military nickname for Kapustin Yar. The rocket base, active since 1947, is known to space historians as the birthplace of not only Tokarev, but the modern Russian missile and space program.

Tokarev’s father was a military officer in the civil engineering corps, and was assigned to the site as part of a major buildup for missile testing in the early 1950s. Residents of the area would have been close enough to see and hear the missiles in flight, and even smell the fires and fuel spills that would have occurred. But Tokarev was too young to remember any of this.

He has told interviewers that his first childhood memories were of a rural area with “lots of cows and tractors, but few cars,” in a small town called Osenyevo ("Autumn"). The town is north of Moscow, 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Yaroslavl, on a small river. This was after his father left the military and moved to Russia's northern pine forests, where he became manager of a collective farm.

Tokarev went through the first eight years of school there, then moved in with his grandmother in the city of Rostov, about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northeast of Moscow, where he attended high school. He graduated in 1969 and entered Air Force pilot training right afterward. While there, he learned that his father, Pavel Tokarev, had been killed in an automobile accident.

By 1973 he was a jet pilot on active duty, and so impressed his commanders that by 1981, at the age of 28, he was transferred to test pilot duties.

Tokarev is matter-of-fact about these accomplishments. “I served as a test pilot, testing the navy versions of different types of aircraft,” he told Dutch space historian Bert Vis in a 1995 interview. These models included helicopters, vertical-takeoff-and-landing airplanes such as the Yak-38, even heavy transport planes — more than two dozen types in all, adding up to 1,600 hours of flight time. He was co-pilot of an Ilyushin-76 that flew across Antarctica.

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