The first cosmonaut of independent Ukraine. The Chernivisti region native began his career as a Soviet military pilot and achieved the rank of major general in the Ukranian Air Force. He had been a member of the USSR Cosmonaut Team since 1976 and had extensive engineering and flight training for Soyuz, Salyut, and Mir missions. In 1996 he became one of the first selected by the Ukraine’s national space agency to partake in a space shuttle mission. NASA assigned him to be one of two payload specialists for the Collaborative Ukrainian Experiment (CUE) which was flown on the space shuttle Columbia (STS-87; from 19 November to 5 December 1997). In completing his first mission, Kadenyuk orbited the Earth 252 times, traveled 6.5 million miles, and logged a total of 15 days, 16 hours, and 34 minutes in space. He died in Kiev, Ukraine, on 31 January 2018.