#Not cosmoaunts; that's your constantly-inebriated older female relatives

[clio-muse-of-history]

August 11

In 1962, Soviet Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to become the third cosmonaut and seventh human to go into space.  

There's nothing easy about spaceflight training, but, of course, the Soviets took everything to the next level.  They placed trainee astronauts into isolation chambers where they had to remain silent and had no way to mark the passage of time; this was done to see how long they would last with no contact in a confined space.  Most trainees cracked pretty quickly; many within a few hours.  Nikolayev?  Four days.  He spent four days in an isolation chamber, and was probably only recovered because the monitors were bored.

That's a bad motherfucker right there.