Makarov died of a heart attack at his home Wednesday, the agency quoted the Kosmos space association as saying.

In 1975 he cheated death in an accident involving the third stage of a Soyuz booster which exploded shortly after lift-off.

The capsule carrying him and a colleague Vasily Lazarev was ejected just seconds before the blast, caused by a fault in the automatic emergency system.

The capsule made a sub-orbital flight and landed safely in a remote mountainous region in the Altai territory in southern Siberia.

The cosmonauts crawled clear of the wreckage and waited for the rescue teams to reach the area.

Makarov trained for Russia's moon mission programme in the 1960s, though this was later aborted, and made his first space flight in 1973.

SPACE.WIRE