Vitali Ivanovich Sevastyanov, cyrillic Виталий Иванович Севастьянов, (born July 8, 1935 in Krasnouralsk[?])
was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 9 and Soyuz 18 missions.
He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Aviation Institute[?] and after graduation in 1959,
joined Sergey Korolev's design bureau, where he worked on the design of the Vostok
spacecraft. He also lectured at the Cosmonaut Training Centre[?],
teaching the physics of spaceflight. In 1967 he commenced cosmonaut training himself.
After two successful missions, including a two-month stay on the Salyut 4 space station,
he was stood down from active flight status in 1976. He worked in ground control for the
Salyut 6 station before returning to spacecraft design in the 1980s to work on the Buran
project.
In 1993, he left the space programme and was elected to the Duma in 1994.