Yaroslav Golovanov

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Yaroslav Golovanov

Yaroslav Kirillovich Golovanov (in Russian Ярослав Кириллович Голованов, June 2, 1932 in Moscow - May 21, 2003 in Peredelkino near Moscow) was a Russian journalist, writer and science popularizer. He covered space exploration by the Soviet Union since its beginnings.

Golovanov's father was director of a theatre (today's Gogol's Theatre), his mother was an actress. Golovanov had studied rocket engineering at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, finishing in 1957(?). During 1956-58 he worked in a laboratory of Ministry of Aviation Industry. In September 1957 he started to write for the science department of the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda and since February 1958 worked here as an editor. Since 1968 until 2003 he was an external collaborator of the daily.

Golovanov soon specialized on space exploration. The first novel "Кузнецы грома" (Thunder Blacksmiths) describes life of Soviet rocket designers, including Sergey Korolyov though this name was not allowed to appear in the print. A book dedicated to Korolyov was published in 1973 but it stops in year 1938 (before the designer got arrested by the NKVD).

Between 1965 and 1966 Golovanov was member of the team of three journalist, unofficial candidates for a space flight. The team was disbanded after Korolyov's death. (Golovanov tried, in vain, to became a cosmonaut during the early 1990s.)

In 1982 he published "Дорога на космодром" (Doroga na kosmodrom, The path to cosmodrome), a detailed overview of the history of space exploration, mainly in the Soviet Union. Detailed biography of Korolyov was published in 1994 under name "Королев. Факты и мифы" (Korolyov - facts and myths). Golovanov's diary of fifty years was published in 1998-99 under name "Заметки вашего современника" (Diary of your contemporary).

In total, Yaroslav Golovanov had published 20 books which were translated into 25 languages.

[edit] Trivia

Dmitri Bilenkin, Agranovsky, Yaroslav Golovanov, Komarov, and an artist Pavel Bunin used the collective pseudonym Pavel Bagryak for some of their works.