Did Anybody Really Fly Into Area Earlier than Yuri Gagarin?

On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, inserting its payload, 27-year-old Air Pressure Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth as soon as earlier than reentering the environment, touchdown by parachute close to town of Engels, Saratov Oblast. Inside hours, newspapers world wide have been trumpeting the stupendous information: for the primary time in historical past, mankind had slipped the surly bonds of earth and travelled within the mysterious realm of outer house.

…or had he? Not like its American counterpart, which carried out its missions in full view of the general public, the Soviet house program was notoriously shrouded in army secrecy. Launches weren’t introduced forward of time and solely made public in the event that they have been profitable – giving the phantasm of an unbroken string of Soviet house successes. Even the identities of the primary Soviet cosmonauts remained a closely-guarded secret till the second they reached orbit. In opposition to this shadowy backdrop of paranoia and secrecy, rumours started to emerge that Yuri Gagarin was not, in truth, the primary man to be launched into house. Others, it was claimed, had been despatched up earlier than him however perished within the try, with their missions – and identities – being coated up by the Soviet authorities. However is any of this true? Did the Soviets truly cowl up the deaths of its cosmonauts, or are these accusations nothing greater than a 60-year outdated cosmic conspiracy concept? Nicely, take your borscht tablets and put your helmet on, Comrade Tom, as dive into the murky and controversial world of the “misplaced” or “phantom” cosmonauts.

Tales of misplaced cosmonauts predate Yuri Gagarin’s historic 1961 flight. Although the Soviets claimed many early house firsts – together with launching the primary synthetic earth satellite tv for pc, inserting the primary residing organism in orbit, and sending the primary probes to the moon – they have been comparatively gradual to place collectively a manned house program, choosing their first slate of 20 cosmonauts a full yr after NASA revealed its Mercury Seven astronauts. The names of those cosmonauts and even the very existence of a Soviet manned house program have been shrouded in official secrecy, resulting in widespread hypothesis by world information and intelligence businesses. For instance, in November 1959, engineer Anatoly Blagonravov was pressured to formally deny the existence of a Soviet manned house program. As a United States Senate committee on aeronautical and house sciences later reported:

“Blagonravov termed reviews of a coaching programme for Russian astronauts ‘ungrounded and stemming primarily from journalistic creativeness.’ He stated Russia has no man-in-space programme as such – only a programme on flight security…Blagonravov’s denial of a particular man-in-space programme on the ARS [American Rocket Society] assembly closes with earlier statements by Professor Andrei Kuznetsov, head of the Soviet aerospace medical programme. Kuznetsov instructed delegates to the 52nd Common Convention of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in Moscow final summer time that the Soviets have chosen 4 astronauts for the primary manned house capsule programme.”

The next month, the Italian information company Continentale revealed data purportedly leaked by a high-ranking Czechoslovak Communist official, revealing that the Soviet Union not solely had a manned house program, however had even performed a sequence of unofficial – and unsuccessful – manned spaceflight. In line with this supply, as early as 1957 4 cosmonauts named Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin, and Maria Gromova have been killed throughout suborbital flights aboard modified R-5A ballistic missiles. This story was additional corroborated by German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, then residing in the USA. 60 years on, no additional proof of Soviet suborbital spaceflight has come to mild, and the unique supply of this story stays a thriller. And in any case, the R-5A was not giant sufficient to hold a human on even a suborbital flight, although animal payloads might have been on board.

Because the Area Race gathered momentum and the superpowers drew ever nearer to the objective of inserting a person in orbit, an increasing number of alleged particulars in regards to the Soviet house programme began appearing within the common media. Within the December 1960 subject of RAF Flying Assessment, an article claimed that:

“Little is thought of the Russian astronauts and even what number of are present process coaching, Names which were revealed embrace Mikhailov, Grachov, Begloniev, Kachur, Zovodosky, and Vladimir Ilyushin, the son of the well-known plane designer.”

The Vladimir Ilyushin turns up repeatedly in rumours about misplaced cosmonauts. On April 10, 1961 – two days earlier than Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight – British correspondent Dennis Ogden revealed an article within the communist newspaper Every day Employee claiming that Ilyushin had been launched into house on April 7 however had been severely injured, inflicting the Soviet authorities to cowl up his mission and launch Gagarin 5 days later. An analogous story was instructed by French broadcaster Eduard Bobrovsky and the American newspaper U.S. Information & World Report, claiming that the alleged flight had truly taken place in March and that Ilyushin had been put in a coma. Later theorists claimed that Ilyushin had by accident landed within the Individuals’s Republic of China and was nonetheless imprisoned there, or that Yuri Gagarin had not even flown in house and was merely swapped in on the final minute as propaganda cowl for Ilyushin’s ill-fated mission.

In actuality, whereas Vladimir Ilyushin was an actual particular person – the eldest son of well-known plane designer Sergei Ilyushin – he was not a cosmonaut, serving most of his profession as an Air Pressure officer, a take a look at pilot for the Sukhoi and Tupolev design bureaus, and later the founder and first president of the Soviet Rugby Federation. Nor was he killed within the line of responsibility, dying of pure causes in 2010 on the ripe outdated age of 83. Moreover, official Soviet data obtained after the autumn of the Iron Curtain reveal no proof of any Vostok rocket launch in March or early April 1961, nor of Ilyushin’s involvement in any manned house missions.

This story about Ilyushin’s alleged mission and its subsequent cover-up angered the Soviets, with house journalist Yaroslav Golovanov writing:

“I initially felt a sure irony and disgust. This can be a properly thought out anti-Soviet propaganda marketing campaign, whose authors have been striving for a few years now to dupe tens of millions of individuals and belittle our nation’s [page 168] scientific and technical achievements…. It’s fairly pure and solely to be anticipated that our enemies ought to need to undermine the importance of [Gagarin’s flight], to search out some flaws in it, and to compromise it indirectly…. Experiences of this sort have been designed for totally ignorant and obtuse readers. I repeat: it is a marketing campaign.”

Satirically, the originator of the story, Dennis Ogden, was a loyal communist with little motivation to discredit the Soviet house program. Reasonably, it’s extra possible Ogden cooked up what he noticed as a compelling story from a couple of threadbare items of proof. Ogden occurred to reside in the identical Moscow condo block as Vladimir Ilyushin, who on the time was recovering from accidents sustained in a automotive crash on June 8, 1960. He thus possible mixed Ilyushin’s accidents with rumours then circulating of a cosmonaut killed in a coaching accident – extra on that later – to weave his story of a spaceflight gone fallacious.

Different tales of misplaced cosmonauts originated from alleged alerts from Soviet spacecraft intercepted by radio amateurs – and none have been extra prolific on this regard than Achille and Gian Judica-Cordiglia, two brothers from the Italian metropolis of Turin. Within the late Fifties, the brothers arrange a makeshift radio listening station in an outdated German bunker often called the Torre Bert, which they used to pay attention to Soviet satellites. Turin was a perfect location for this exercise, being the one a part of Western Europe which lay alongside the orbital path of Soviet spacecraft. From October 1957 onward, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers used their makeshift tools to intercept telemetry and voice transmissions from satellites similar to Sputnik 1 and 2 and manned house missions similar to Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 and John Glenn’s Friendship 7. However additionally they claimed to have acquired stranger, extra disturbing alerts. On November 28, 1960, 5 months earlier than Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, the Bochum house observatory in West Germany introduced the interception of a doable satellite tv for pc sign. As Gian Judica-Cordiglia later recalled:

“Our response was to instantly swap on the receivers and hear. It was a sign we recognised instantly as Morse code – SOS.”

However there was one thing odd about this sign. Reasonably than flying by overhead, it gave the impression to be coming from a single level within the sky, and slowly shifting away from the earth. Ultimately, the SOS light to silence. This recording fuelled hypothesis that the Soviets had tried to launch a cosmonaut – rumoured to be named Gennady Mikhailov – however that the spacecraft had did not enter orbit, as a substitute flying off into deep house.

On February 2, 1961, the brothers have been scanning Russian frequencies once they picked up a transmission from an orbiting satellite tv for pc. It seemed like a human voice, wheezing and combating for breath. Surprisingly, no Soviet house launches have been recorded throughout this era; the final official launch was Korabl-Sputnik 2 – an unmanned take a look at model of the Vostok capsule – on August 19, 1960, whereas the subsequent was the Venus probe Venera 1 on February 12, 1961.

And on Could 19, 1961, the brothers recorded their most annoying transmission but, which seemed like a feminine voice shouting:

“Are available… are available in… are available in… Hear! Are available! Speak to me! I’m scorching! I’m scorching! Are available! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Sure. Sure, sure, respiration. Oxygen, oxygen… I’m scorching. This… isn’t this harmful?” Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Sure, I really feel scorching. I really feel scorching, it’s all… it’s all scorching. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Sure, sure I really feel scorching… I’m listening, I really feel scorching, I’ll re-enter. I’m scorching!”

Over the next decade, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers made dozens of comparable recordings, propelling them to worldwide fame. They performed dozens of interviews and even appeared on and gained the Italian model of the TV quiz present Mastermind. Their prize? An opportunity to go to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. However whereas on the time U.S. Intelligence businesses thought their claims of secret Soviet spaceflights to be believable, newer evaluations of the so-called “Torre Bert recordings” have forged critical doubt on the Judica-Cordiglia brothers’ work. In lots of the recordings, the alleged cosmonauts – who would all have been highly-trained army pilots – ceaselessly break official communications protocol, use incorrect technical terminology, or make grammatical errors that no native Russian speaker would make. Later in life, the brothers admitted that stress to supply outcomes led them to brighten and even forge among the recordings, however they insisted that almost all of them have been real. The reality of the matter has by no means been decided.

However the Judica-Cordiglia brothers have been hardly the one supply of misplaced cosmonaut tales. In 1960, American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote an article titled Pravda Means ‘Fact’, during which he claimed that whereas visiting Vilnius, Soviet Lithuania, on Could 15, he was instructed by a bunch of Military cadets that the Soviets had launched a person into house that day however that the federal government had saved the mission secret. The date of Heinlein’s declare corresponds completely with the launch of Korabl-Sputnik 1, first take a look at flight of the Vostok spacecraft that will finally carry Yuri Gagarin and 5 different cosmonauts into house. The four-day mission was largely profitable, however when controllers tried to carry the spacecraft house, the retrorockets fired within the fallacious orientation and the capsule did not reenter as deliberate. The spacecraft finally decayed from orbit two and a half afterward September 5, 1962, breaking apart into a number of items because it reentered the environment. One giant piece landed on a avenue nook within the metropolis of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the place the influence web site is now marked by a metal ring embedded within the pavement.

Korabl-Sputnik 1 was adopted by one other take a look at flight on July 28, 1960, with a pair of canines named Bars and Lisichka on board. Sadly, one of many rocket’s strap-on boosters failed 19 seconds after takeoff and all the automobile disintegrated. The launch escape system or LES separated the capsule as designed, however the parachutes failed to totally deploy and the capsule impacted the bottom at excessive velocity, killing each canines. Two weeks afterward August 19, Korabl-Sputnik 2 was efficiently launched, orbiting the earth for someday earlier than reentering the environment and parachuting to the bottom. Aboard have been forty mice, two rats, and two canines named Belka and Strelka – the primary organisms to be launched into orbit and safely recovered. Korabl-Sputnik 3, launched on December 1, 1960, was additionally largely profitable, however an error throughout retrofire positioned the capsule on a trajectory the place it risked being captured and inspected by international powers. The choice was thus made to self-destruct the capsule, killing the 2 canines Pcholka and Mushka aboard. Two extra totally profitable take a look at flights adopted: Korabl-Sputnik 4 on March 9, 1961, carrying mice, guinea pigs, and a canine named Chernushka; and Korabl-Sputnik 5 on March 25, carrying a canine named Zvezdochka.

Along with animals and take a look at instrumentation, all of the Korabl-Sputnik flights carried a life-sized human dummy nicknamed “Ivan Ivanovich” – the Russian equal of “John Doe” – to check the Sokol house swimsuit and the capsule’s life assist system and ejection seat. Not like the American Mercury capsule which splashed down within the ocean, the Vostok capsule was designed to land within the huge territory of the Soviet Union. Because the capsule couldn’t carry a parachute giant sufficient to soundly land each itself and the cosmonaut inside, the cosmonaut as a substitute ejected at an altitude of seven kilometres and parachuted to the bottom individually from the capsule. Curiously, the Soviets saved this facet of their spaceflights secret for a few years because the official guidelines of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale or FAI concerning spaceflight data specified that the astronaut needed to land with their spacecraft. Later, nevertheless, these guidelines have been amended to acknowledge Soviet spaceflight achievements.

Recognizing that the lifelike Ivan Ivanovich dummy could be mistaken for a lifeless cosmonaut – or worse, an American U2 spy airplane pilot – mission planners wrote the phrase maket or “dummy” in giant letters on the again of the spacesuit and on a chunk of froth rubber tucked beneath the helmet visor. Along with evaluating the life assist system, Ivan Ivanovich additionally carried a tape recorder to check the capsule’s communications tools. As soon as once more, mission planners anticipated that bizarre voice alerts could be intercepted and misinterpreted as proof that the spacecraft was manned, so to keep away from any confusion they selected to broadcast a recording of the Piatnitsky Choir blended with a single voice studying a recipe for cabbage soup. Lastly, the launch crews at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan opted to eschew the basic launch countdown. As one designer on the OKB-1 design bureau later defined:

“We rejected a numerical countdown, fearing western radio stations would monitor the human voice and lift a clamour all through the world alleging that Russia has secretly put a person into orbit.”

Curiously, the rocket countdown was initially invented for the 1929 German science fiction movie Frau Im Mond and subsequently adopted by German rocket engineers throughout the Second World Conflict for the event of the notorious V-2 ballistic missile. When those self same engineers have been delivered to the USA after the battle as a part of Operation Paperclip, they introduced the custom of the countdown with them. Along with the sensible issues, Russian engineers additionally noticed the countdown as a frivolous piece of theatre and most popular to unceremoniously launch their rockets on the appointed time.

But regardless of these precautions, many radio operators just like the Judica-Cordiglia brothers misinterpreted the alerts from the Korabl-Sputniks as coming from a residing cosmonaut. And the Soviet planners’ fears in regards to the lifelike look of Ivan Ivanovich proved well-founded. When Korabl-Sputnik 5 landed close to the village of Bolshaya Sosnova on March 25, 1961, as predicted the villagers mistook the limp space-suited determine for an American spy airplane pilot, and grew agitated when the restoration crew refused to assist him. It was not till an elder stepped ahead and confirmed the determine was in truth a model that they lastly calmed down. Although we will by no means know for certain, it’s doable that many phantom cosmonaut rumours from this period originated from distorted reviews of the restoration of Ivan Ivanovich dummies.

However whereas a lot of the early phantom cosmonaut tales have been both pure fabrications or gross exaggerations primarily based on scanty proof, at the very least some contained a kernel of fact. For instance, in early 1963 the Canadian Press Company ran an article by Arthur Karday, Russian correspondent for the Vancouver Solar, containing a translated excerpt from the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. The article, which coated the current twin Vostok 3 and 4 mission of cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Andriyan Nikolayev, learn partially:

“One of many actually magnificent and awe-inspiring monuments to the human spirit within the self-sacrifice of two different heavenly heroes – Andreyev and Dolgov. Considered one of them Dolgov, was destined to not return from the stratosphere. He, just like the Georgian eagle, sacrificed his life in an effort to save a whole bunch and maybe 1000’s of different spacemen by way of his heroism.”

The alleged cosmonauts named within the article have been Main Yevgeny Andreyev and Colonel Pyotr Dolgov, officers within the Soviet Air Pressure and skilled high-altitude parachutists. Dolgov, together with Ivan Kachur, Alexis Belokonev, and Alexey Grachov, have been featured in a 1959 article within the Soviet journal Ogoniok, the place they have been proven testing varied items of high-altitude tools together with stress fits. Since on the time the existence of a Soviet manned house programme was nonetheless a closely-guarded secret, it was broadly assumed that these males have been secretly coaching to be cosmonauts. This declare was repeated within the 1961 ebook Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Area by Wilfred Burchett and Anthony Purdy – the primary authoritative western account of the Soviet house program.

Across the time Karday’s article was revealed, rumours had begun to flow into that Dolgov had been killed throughout a secret orbital spaceflight on October 11, 1960 – six months earlier than Yuri Gagarin’s profitable flight. Because it turned out, this hearsay was partially true: Pyotr Dolgov was certainly killed within the line of responsibility – although not till two years later and never whereas flying an area mission. Although Dolgov was related to the Soviet manned house programme, he was by no means chosen as a cosmonaut and was as a substitute concerned within the testing of varied parts of the Vostok capsule’s escape and survival tools, together with the Sokol house swimsuit, the ejection seat, and the parachute system. A few of these assessments concerned dropping mockup capsules from plane, whereas others concerned leaping or ejecting from a Volga helium balloon, which may carry a spherical pressurized gondola with two parachutists into the higher stratosphere.

At 7:44 AM on November 1, 1962, a Volga balloon carrying Pyotr Dolgov and Yevgeny Adreyev lifted off from Volsk, Saratov Oblast, and slowly rose into the sky. Two and a half hours later, because the balloon approached an altitude of 25,500 metres, Andreyev ready to eject:

“Having depressurized my part of the cabin, I waved goodbye to Dolgov who was preparing for the bounce behind a clear hermetic partition, and ejected into the void of the stratosphere. I didn’t really feel the standard swirl of the air stream. To stop the entrance glass of my stress helmet from freezing over I turned on my again and noticed the black velvet of the evening sky studded with the numerous diamonds of bluish-silver stars. Plummeting to about 12 kilometres at some 900 km/h I started to really feel the rising resistance of the environment. I turned once more to face the earth, and after free-falling spread-eagled for some time, I pulled the ripcord.

After a profitable gentle touchdown – I even managed to stay on my toes – my first thought was for Dolgov. I regarded up and noticed the cover of his chute – all the pieces was okay. And it merely couldn’t be in any other case; an ace parachutist, Pyotr had examined fairly a couple of subtle ejection seats and capsules, had ejected from planes at supersonic speeds, and had taken half in lots of record-breaking and delayed-opening jumps.

Nonetheless, a pilot of a assist celebration airplane monitoring the descent reported to the management put up that Dolgiv appeared limp within the harness. I felt a knot in my throat.

An ambulance was on the touchdown spot earlier than Dolgov’s physique touched the bottom. A small gap in his stress helmet instructed the story, I appeared that when leaving the nacelle Pyotr had hit some metallic half along with his helmet and had been immediately killed by the depressurization. Later, a particular timer had mechanically opened his parachute.”

Dolgov’s ill-fated bounce was the 1,409^th of his profession. Within the wake of the catastrophe, Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev ordered the hatch on the Vostok spacecraft enlarged and a 2-second delay between the hatch being jettisoned and the cosmonaut ejecting to stop any repeat of Dolgov’s tragic accident.

By 1962, tales of misplaced cosmonauts have been so ubiquitous that the irritated Soviets have been pressured to try to set the report straight. When requested about misplaced cosmonauts throughout his 1962 tour of the USA, Gherman Titov – the second man to orbit the earth – replied:

“I’ve heard about that. In line with your newspapers, the soviet union has misplaced not one, however 5 cosmonauts. They even named them. We had no cosmonauts in our nation earlier than the primary cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.”

And when, in 1963, the New York Journal American revealed a narrative claiming that parachutists Alexei Belokonev and Gennady Mikhailov have been among the many cosmonauts whose deaths had been coated up by the federal government, Alexei Adzhubei, editor-in-chief of the Soviet Newspaper Izvestia, introduced the nonetheless very a lot alive males into his workplace to be photographed. This {photograph} was broadly circulated within the Soviet media as a riposte to tales about misplaced cosmonauts. Belokonev and Mikhailov additionally wrote an offended letter to the New York Journal American editor William Randolph Hearst, Jr, however they have been ignored.

But despite these denials, it’s now identified that the Soviet authorities did certainly cowl up many accidents and disasters associated to its house program. For instance, on October 24, 1960, a prototype R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile exploded whereas being ready for a take a look at flight at Baikonur Cosmodrome, incinerating over 150 individuals together with the director of the take a look at, Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin. The catastrophe, now often called the Nedelin Disaster, was instantly coated up by the Soviet authorities, who claimed that Marshall Nedelin had died in a airplane crash. The reality in regards to the incident was not formally acknowledged till 1989 -a nd for extra on this, please try our earlier video Disaster: the Soviet Area Program’s Darkest Day over on our sister channel Spotlight Historical past.

And within the Seventies, American journalist and house historian James Oberg, writer of The Crimson Star in Orbit, uncovered compelling proof that the identification of at the very least among the authentic cosmonauts had been coated up. In Could 1961, a bunch of main figures within the Soviet manned house program, together with chief designer Sergei Korolev and a variety of cosmonauts, posed for {a photograph} on the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. The unique {photograph}, circulated by the Soviet authorities, reveals 5 cosmonauts: Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, and Valery Bykovsky. Nonetheless, in an earlier model uncovered by Oberg, a sixth, unnamed cosmonaut seems within the background – a determine crudely airbrushed out of the official {photograph}. Erasing politically inconvenient figures from pictures was a standard apply within the Soviet Union. For instance, a well-known {photograph} of Vladimir Lenin talking on Could 5, 1920, was progressively depopulated as key figures within the picture fell out of favour; whereas the picture of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD secret police, was faraway from a widely-circulated {photograph} of Josef Stalin after he was purged and executed in 1940. It will be one other decade earlier than the identification of the erased cosmonaut lastly got here to mild. In 1986, on the twenty fifth Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 mission, house journalist Yaroslav Golovanov revealed his identify to be

Grigori Nelyubov; and whereas he was not killed throughout a secret spaceflight as initially suspected, his story is nonetheless a tragic one.

A member of the so-called “vanguard six” cosmonauts chosen to make the primary manned spaceflights, Nelyubov was a boastful and boastful man, vulnerable to heavy ingesting and combative behaviour. Whereas his glorious efficiency throughout cosmonaut coaching had lengthy saved him in prime rotation for a Vostok mission, his vices lastly caught up with him on March 27, 1963. That night, Nelyubov, together with fellow cosmonauts Ivan Anikeyev and Valentin Filatyev, left the cosmonaut coaching centre at Star Metropolis for a drunken evening in town on the close by Chkalovsky railway station. The trio obtained so rowdy that the proprietor of the station bar known as the close by air pressure base to have them eliminated, whereupon the cosmonauts determined to depart of their very own accord. On arriving again at Star Metropolis, the cosmonauts found that they’d forgotten their gate passes, and obtained right into a heated argument with the safety officer on responsibility. Nelyubov, significantly drunk and pugnacious, insisted that he was an vital cosmonaut and aggressively demanded to be let by way of. The responsibility officer duly arrested the three and reported their transgressions to their commanding officer, Common Nikolai Kamanin.

The subsequent day Nelyubov, Anikeyev, and Filatyev have been hauled earlier than Kamanin, who supplied to allow them to off with a reprimand in the event that they made an official apology. Whereas Anikeyev and Filatyev readily agreed, Nelyubov stubbornly refused. Kamanin referred the matter to the opposite cosmonauts, who voted unanimously to expel the trio from the manned house program. The official dismissal order was handed out on April 17.

On being expelled, all three former cosmonauts resumed their earlier careers as Air Pressure officers. Valentin Filatyev retired from the Air Pressure in November 1969 with the rank of Main, then labored on the state industrial design bureau in Orel and as a civil protection teacher earlier than dying of pure causes in 1989. Ivan Anikeyev was posted to Russia’s northern territory and remained in lively service till 1965 whereupon he served as a floor controller earlier than retiring with the rank of Captain. In line with fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, at one level a thief stole Anikeyev’s keys and used his automotive to run over a pedestrian earlier than returning the keys. Anikeyev was arrested and imprisoned for a yr earlier than he was lastly discovered harmless. Nonetheless, he was positioned on reserve standing and by no means flew once more, dying of most cancers in 1992.

In the meantime, Grigori Nebyulov discovered it troublesome to deal with the disgrace of being expelled from the cosmonaut corps. On returning to Air Pressure service, he was assigned to an interceptor squadron in Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. Right here, he fell right into a deep melancholy and started ingesting closely. In late 1963, cosmonaut Pavel Popovich visited Nelyubov in Vladivostok and prompt that if he apologized to Kamanin, he could be returned to flight standing. Swallowing his pleasure, Nelyubov travelled to Moscow to ship his apology, however Common Kamanin was too busy to see him and the assembly by no means befell. In early 1966, Nelyubov despatched an attraction to Sergei Korolev, solely to find that the Chief Designer had instantly died whereas present process routine stomach surgical procedure. Determined for any sort of significant flight project, Nelyubov repeatedly utilized to be a take a look at pilot, however was regularly denied.

Ultimately the disgrace and disappointment turned an excessive amount of for Nelyubov to bear, and on February 17, 1967 he snuck out of his home and trudged by way of the snowy evening to have a drink within the close by city of Ippolitovka. Whereas crossing a rail bridge, a passing prepare kicked up a heavy picket beam and launched it into Nelyubov’s head, killing him immediately. Whereas his dying was formally dominated an accident, his widow insisted it was suicide, claiming that he had left her a word.

Nelyubov was buried as an Air Pressure officer, his standing as a former cosmonaut being expunged from official data. It was a tragic finish for a younger man with a lot potential. As his buddy and colleague Pavel Popovich later acknowledged:

“He skilled his dismissal as very painful – a large amount of ache. It resulted in a really speedy drop in his spirit. I talked to him on a number of events and generally he even accused me of being answerable for his dismissal, as a result of on the time I had been a commander of the detachment…of the crew. I attempted to show to him that I wasn’t concerned and had nothing to do along with his dismissal, however he didn’t consider me.

…if I used to be impolite with you and if I’m an trustworthy, first rate man, all I’ve to do is have the braveness to apologize. I might say ‘Please excuse me, I simply exceeded my powers; I used to be over-excited, please excuse me.’ Nebyulov didn’t do this; that’s why he suffered. It was the results of his personal fault.”

I used to be in all probability the primary one to listen to about his dying, however I made a decision to not fly right down to his funeral. And even when all of the cosmonauts had identified about his dying, no one would have gone. Normally, we didn’t forgive the betrayal. And he betrayed us.”

Nebyulov wouldn’t be the primary nor the final cosmonaut expelled from the Soviet house program. Throughout the interval of preliminary coaching in 1960 and 1961, Anatoliy Kartashov developed pores and skin bleeding throughout centrifuge assessments, whereas Valentin Varlamov dislocated his backbone whereas diving right into a shallow stream. Each have been dismissed from the programme for medical causes. And, similar to Nelyubov, Anikeyev, and Filatyev a yr later, in 1962 cosmonaut Mars Rafikov was expelled for disciplinary causes.

However whereas most early cosmonauts left this system very a lot alive, one met a a lot grimmer destiny.

Rumours had lengthy circulated {that a} cosmonaut had died in a coaching accident simply previous to Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight. In 1982, Russian emigre S. Tiktin instructed a West German anti-Soviet journal of a cosmonaut who was fatally burned in a fireplace in an oxygen chamber, giving the sufferer’s identify as Boyko or Boychenko. Two years later, a Russian surgeon named Dr. Vladimir Golyakhovsky corroborated this story, claiming that the burned cosmonaut had been delivered to the Botkin Hospital outdoors Moscow the place he was then working. However it was not till 1986 that Yarolslav Golovanov formally confirmed the story and revealed the unlucky cosmonaut’s identify: Valentin Vasilyevich Bondarenko.

Born on Februrary 16, 1937 in Kharkov – then the capital of Ukraine – Bondarenko was the youngest son of Vasily Griorevich and Olga Ivanovna Bondareko, who labored in an area fur manufacturing unit. In 1941, Bondarenko’s father joined a partisan unit to fend off the German invasion of the Soviet union, profitable seven medals of distinction for his service. Kharkov suffered closely throughout the battle, altering arms a number of instances and being nearly utterly destroyed earlier than it was liberated by Soviet forces in August 1943. After the battle, Bondarenko completed secondary college whereas taking flying classes at his native aero membership, graduating in 1954. He was then conscripted into the military and enrolled within the air pressure school at Voroshilovgrad – modern-day Lugansk. Whereas deployed to Grozny in modern-day Chechnya, he married his sweetheart Galina Senenovna Rykova and welcomed his first little one – a son named Aleksandr – in 1956. In 1957 Bondarenko graduated from Armavir Larger Air Pressure Pilots Faculty with the rank of Lieutenant and spent the subsequent two years flying MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters with the No.868 unit of 175 fighter regiment primarily based at Kaunus within the Baltic Union Republics, accumulating 288 flying hours.

On December 26, 1959, Bondarenko turned the primary in his unit to be interviewed as a possible cosmonaut candidate, later travelling to Moscow to endure a gruelling battery of medical assessments. In March 1960, he was chosen as a part of the primary group of 20 cosmonauts, and reported to the Cosmonaut Coaching Centre at Star Metropolis, northwest of Moscow. At solely 24 years of age, he was the youngest particular person in historical past to be chosen for spaceflight.

Bondarenko was popular with his fellow cosmonauts, who fondly remembered his glorious singing voice and boundless ardour for sports activities similar to table-tennis and soccer. As Pavel Popovich later recalled:

“He was a really good-natured, merry fellow. He was nicknamed Zvonochek (Tinkerbell), however I can not keep in mind why.”

Cosmonaut coaching at Star Metropolis was an intensive affair, comprising lengthy days of technical lectures; bodily coaching together with gymnastics, hockey, basketball, and cross-country snowboarding; high-g coaching in centrifuges, wilderness survival coaching, simulated missions in a mockup of the Vostok capsule, zero-g coaching in a specifically modified Tupolev Tu-104 plane, and parachute coaching. However the ordeal that the cosmonauts feared most was the so-called “chamber of silence” on the Centre for Biomedical Issues in Moscow, designed to check the psychological results of isolation throughout a protracted spaceflight. This consisted of a giant stress chamber with a heavy metal door mounted on rubber shock absorbers to isolate it from vibration. The metallic partitions have been soundproof, whereas the inside may solely be seen by way of a pair of thick glass portholes or a closed-circuit tv system; as soon as a cosmonaut was sealed inside, they have been utterly reduce off from the surface world.

The inside of the chamber was sparsely furnished, with a small metallic mattress, a picket desk, a chair designed to appear to be the Vostok capsule ejection seat, a bathroom, and primary cooking utensils together with an electrical scorching plate and a saucepan for heating up canned meals. A telegraph key was supplied for communication with the take a look at screens, whereas a board with black and crimson numbered squares mounted on the wall for psychological agility assessments. The stress contained in the chamber could possibly be diverse to simulate completely different altitudes, and varied noises piped in to check the topic’s reactions. For the sake of comparability, some topics have been allowed studying materials whereas others weren’t, the latter being supplied with alternate actions similar to colored pencils or blocks of wooden and a carving knife. All of the whereas, the themes wore an array of bio-sensors to watch their physiological reactions.

The primary cosmonaut to courageous the chamber of silence was Valery Bykovsky. As Yevgeny Karpov, head of cosmonaut coaching, later recalled:

“How Valery felt I didn’t know, however we have been all a bit nervous, This was the primary time one in all our males was to enter that unknown realm of silence. There was no hazard; watchful researchers can be there on a regular basis. What troubled us was one thing else – how would the primary man react? The behaviour of the remaining hinged largely on that . Registering devices of the most recent sort saved fixed watch. Valery behaved unusually at first. He gave the impression to be in an unreasonable hurry. Fished with one factor, he moved to a different after solely a second’s thought. He reached instantly for the telegraph key and hurriedly started to ship the message ‘…air temperature…stress…humidity.’

However the preliminary pleasure subsided as quickly as he adjusted to the scenario. He started to work in line with schedule, rationally and with out undue haste. He saved an eye fixed on the devices and reported on occasion. He skilfully repaired one of many units that went out of order. When he was not busy at assigned duties, he wrote and sketched.

The stress was modified a number of instances and the routine disturbed by shiny pictures of sunshine and harsh sounds, however he reacted rationally and in good time to all disturbances. He slept soundly, awoke precisely on schedule, and moved promptly to his assigned duties. Valery got here by way of the take a look at with flying colors and returned from his ‘cosmic’ voyage in excellent well being and good spirits.”

Totally different cosmonauts reacted in a different way to the chamber, and had completely different methods for dealing with the isolation. As Gherman Titov recalled:

“It’s quiet, very quiet. However the phrase does probably not describe the scenario. Full absence of sound. Not a faucet, not a rustle, not a splash, not a sigh. Such absolute silence takes some getting used to; one should acclimatize oneself to it, protect what the medical doctors name one’s neuropsychiatric equilibrium. A look at my non permanent residence and its scanty furnishings. A small armchair at a desk. A particular switchboard and, beside it, a tv digital camera. Every part wanted for a protracted period flight lies readily to hand- meals, water, residing utensils, books to learn, a pocket book.

I make entries within the logbook and carry out a variety of different duties. It is rather like an actual flight. I do know I need to hold watch with faultless accuracy, and never a lot as a result of I’m being noticed by tv digital camera as togged used to sustaining a gradual rhythm of life in such situations.”

Titov spent his spare time reciting the poetry of Alexander Pushkin and mentally disassembling and reassembling a automotive. He additionally stunned the take a look at screens by discovering a extra environment friendly approach to prepare dinner his meals. Whereas the opposite cosmonauts merely poured the meals from the cans into the saucepan, Titov realized that cleansing out the pan afterward consumed a big portion of his restricted water provide. He thus opted to fill the saucepan with water and use it to boil his meals immediately within the can.

In the meantime, Pavel Popvich, a proud Ukrainian, loudly sang songs of his homeland, whereas Yuri Gagarin pictured what his upcoming spaceflight would appear to be:

“I assumed in regards to the future, not the previous, as one normally does in such circumstances. I imagined myself within the cabin of Vostok. I closed my eyes and noticed the continents and oceans passing under the change of day and evening, and much, far down, golden clusters of metropolis lights. Though I used to be by no means overseas I pictured myself flying over Peking and London Rome and Paris, and over my native Gzhatsk…all this helped me maintain the pressure of utter isolation.”

Boris Volynov, who was pressured to spend his 26^th birthday within the chamber, later recalled the unnerving results of whole isolation:

“At first it was unusual to be with out individuals. Then I obtained used to it. I began to do plenty of work. You already know, it’s a very good factor that the day within the chamber is so utterly stuffed that there is no such thing as a time to be lonely. There’s at all times one thing to do. The medical doctors are great in that respect. I checked on the thermometers, the hygrometers, I saved checking on the devices, and preparedly personal meals…however the day comes whenever you lastly wish to speak to somebody. I had such a day…my birthday. Think about – I’ve spent my 25 birthday on earth and my twenty sixth needed to be spent within the ‘cosmos’. Have you ever any thought what it means to take a seat alone, enclosed in 4 partitions for thus many days? And think about that I’m a pilot…the entire sky was mine. And instantly, as a substitute of the sky, a small slim chamber.

On my birthday I needed very a lot for somebody to be with me…to listen to some good variety phrases…a reside human voice. A person phrase, solely a single phrase, what would I not have given for a single phrase.

After I got here out, one thing unbelievable occurred to me. Everybody gathered round me, motion-picture cameras started buzzing, and the ladies have been shouting ‘Nicely, inform us one thing; inform us.’ And I can do nothing however stand there and stay silent. I’m so blissful that I take a look at the individuals with clean eyes and might’t say a phrase; nearly as if I had forgotten easy methods to converse. I had longed a lot for human speech that I’m ready till somebody would say one thing, something. I’m sick of my very own voice.”

Valentin Bondarenko was the second-last cosmonaut to endure this ordeal when he stepped into the chamber on March 13, 1961. Ten days afterward March 23, a inexperienced mild within the chamber flicked on, indicating that his assigned duties for that day have been full. Bondarenko duly started eradicating the biosensors from his physique, utilizing a cotton ball soaked in alcohol to wash off the conductive paste residue. Then, instantly, all hell broke unfastened. In a second of carelessness, Bondarenko tossed the used cotton ball over his shoulder. It fell into the glowing coils of an electrical house heater and burst into flames. On the time, the chamber was pressurized to a simulated altitude of 5 kilometres and contained an environment with 68% oxygen. On this enriched surroundings the hearth rapidly raged uncontrolled, leaping to Bondarenko’s wool flight swimsuit. He desperately tried to beat out the flames, however this simply succeeded in spreading them, and shortly Bondarenko’s physique was engulfed in hearth.

Exterior the chamber, responsibility physician Mikhail Novikov and a technical assist crew rushed to the hatch, but it surely may solely be opened as soon as the stress inside and out of doors the chamber had equalized. After many agonizing minutes they lastly wrenched the door open and dragged out Bondarenko’s charred physique. Extremely, Bondarenko was nonetheless alive, and as he was carried out of the chamber he reassured his comrades:

“It’s my fault…I’m so sorry…nobody is in charge!”

Bondarenko was whisked to the Botkin Hospital in northeast Moscow, the place Dr. Vladimir Golyakhovsky was on responsibility. He later recalled receiving a frantic telephone name from a Colonel Ivanov from the Central Aviation Institute of Drugs and, minutes later, seeing a convoy of official-looking black Volga vehicles and a army ambulance pull as much as the hospital. The affected person they introduced in was a horrifying sight:

“The physique was completely denuded of pores and skin, the pinnacle of hair; there have been no eyes within the face – all the pieces had been burnt away. It was a complete burn of the severest diploma.”

Certainly, so completely burned as Bondarenko’s physique that the one place that could possibly be discovered to start out an IV have been the soles of his toes, which had been shielded from the flames by thick-soled sneakers. Bondarenko was given morphine, which appeared to assist along with his ache, however there was little else Dr. Golyakhovsky and his employees may do. Inside hours, Bondarenko succumbed to his burns.

Curiously, Dr. Golyakhovsky later claimed to have encountered a fellow cosmonaut at Bondarenko’s bedside:

“He was very small in stature and his wrist was as skinny as a baby’s. However he gave me a robust man’s handshake. His face caught in my reminiscence and [just three weeks later] I noticed his {photograph} within the newspapers: his identify was Yuri Gagarin; he was the primary man in house.”

Nonetheless, that is possible a case of defective reminiscence, for on the time Yuri Gagarin was on the Baikonur cosmodrome supervising the launch of Korabl-Sputnik 5, and was unlikely to have flown all the best way again to Moscow to be at Bondarenko’s bedside.

Although Bondarenko was buried as an Air Pressure pilot, with no recognition of his standing as a cosmonaut, his household have been nonetheless supplied with all of the requirements concordant with that standing. He was additionally posthumously awarded the Order of the Crimson Star in June 1961. Nonetheless, all information of his horrific dying was suppressed, and all those that witnessed the incident have been sworn to secrecy.

It has typically been argued that if the Soviet house program had not been so secretive and shared the main points of Bondarenko’s dying with the Individuals, then the Apollo 1 catastrophe of January 27, 1967 – during which astronauts Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee perished in an identical oxygen-fuelled hearth – may need been averted. Nonetheless, that is unlikely, for NASA was properly conscious of the hazards of fires in pure oxygen environments. Certainly, previous to Apollo 1 there have been seven recorded circumstances of extreme oxygen fires in the USA alone, together with a decompression chamber accident in 1965 that killed two U.S. Navy divers. Regardless of this, for the sake of simplicity and expedience NASA continued to make use of pure-oxygen atmospheres aboard its spacecraft – with tragic penalties. And for extra on a forgotten near-disaster that predated the Apollo 1 hearth, please try our earlier video That Time NASA Nearly Turned Two Astronauts into Roman Candles.

Because the house race wore on, it turned more durable and more durable for the Soviets to cover their failures. The subsequent main tragedy to befall the Soviet house program occurred in 1967 throughout the maiden flight of the brand new Soyuz spacecraft. The event of the spacecraft was notoriously rushed, with engineers reporting 203 main flaws within the design. Nonetheless, the Politburo pressured the planners into launching the spacecraft on schedule so it might coincide with the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s delivery. And so, Soyuz 1 was launched on April 23, 1967 with cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov aboard. As anticipated, the mission was a catastrophe, with the spacecraft struggling dozens of technical faults together with a extreme energy scarcity attributable to one photo voltaic panel failing to deploy. And when the spacecraft lastly reentered the earth’s environment, the parachutes did not deploy and the capsule slammed into the bottom at 140 kilometres per hour, killing Komarov immediately – and for extra on this ill-fated mission, please try our earlier video The Most Disastrous Area Mission Ever Mounted.

Although information of the Soyuz 1 catastrophe quickly leaked to the world press, the affect of the misplaced cosmonaut rumours have been clearly felt in the best way the incident was reported on. A number of sources reported that radio amateurs had intercepted transmissions from Komarov as he reentered the environment, making tearful goodbyes to his spouse and angrily cursing the engineers who constructed his defective spacecraft in addition to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. Nonetheless, these claims are nearly definitely false, as Komarov’s final recorded phrases – transmitted simply previous to reentry – have been merely “Thanks, inform everybody it occurred.” The ionization blackout – the blocking of radio alerts by scorching, ionized gasoline accumulating across the spacecraft – would have prevented any subsequent transmissions from reaching the bottom. Related rumours emerged following the Soyuz 11 catastrophe of June 29, 1971, during which a caught air flow valve triggered the capsule to depressurize throughout reentry, suffocating cosmonauts Georgy Dobrolovsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev.

Even the autumn of the Soviet Union in 1991 didn’t carry an finish to the misplaced cosmonaut conspiracies. Within the early 2000s, a narrative emerged that in 1969, the Soviets swiftly tried to launch a Soyuz 7K-L3 capsule on a circumlunar flight forward of the American Apollo 11 mission. Sadly, the capsule shot previous the moon, sending the crew – which allegedly included a cosmonaut named Andrei Mikoyan – drifting off into deep house. Along with there being no official report of such a launch, a mission of this sort would have been all however unimaginable. On the time, the one Soviet rocket able to reaching a translunar trajectory was the N-1 – the Soviet equal of the American Saturn V moon rocket. The N-1 was examined 4 instances on February 21 and July 3, 1969; June 26, 1971; and November 23, 1972, with every launch ending in failure. The second failure was significantly dramatic, leading to one of many largest artifical non-nuclear explosions in historical past with an equal yield of 1,000 tons of TNT. As these launches have been carefully monitored by American spy satellites, it’s unlikely one may have been performed in secret. Certainly, the story of Andrei Mikoyan’s ill-fated spaceflight was most definitely primarily based on an October 28, 1996 episode of the American tv sequence The Cape, which featured an nearly similar plot and character identify.

In 1997, one other story emerged concerning the flight of Soyuz 3 on October 26, 1968. Formally, the Soyuz 3 spacecraft, flown by cosmonaut Goergy Beregovoy, rendezvoused in orbit with the unmanned Soyuz 2. In line with the story, nevertheless, Soyuz 2 was truly manned by cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov, who abruptly stopped transmitting throughout the mission – the sufferer of a meteorite strike. His identify and involvement within the mission have been subsequently expunged from Soviet data, and Soyuz 2 formally acknowledged to be unmanned.

Although this story was picked up by a number of world information shops, it was quickly revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by Spanish conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta, whose work typically focuses on the manipulability of historic data. Fontcuberta’s exhibit, titled Sputnik, was exhibited in artwork museums world wide and comprised dozens of fabricated mission artefacts, digitally manipulated photos, and detailed biographies of Istochnikov and different historic paperwork. Looking back, had the sources who repeated the story examined the proof a bit extra carefully, they’d have seen dozens of clues as to the story’s true nature. For instance, the identify “Ivan Istochnikov” interprets to “John Hidden Fountain” – as does the identify of artist Joan Fontcuberta. Alleged pictures of Istochnikov have been created from photos of Fontcuberta’s face, whereas the biographies and different paperwork featured within the exhibit comprise a whole bunch of historic and technical errors. Much more blatantly, the exhibit packages and web sites function a number of, barely-concealed situations of the phrases PURE FICTION.

That the story of Ivan Istochnikov was so readily believed speaks to the seductive energy of the misplaced cosmonaut fable, which has impressed a whole bunch of works of fiction over the past six a long time. The intense secrecy and paranoia that characterised the Soviet Union – to not point out its notorious disregard for human life – furnished a perfect breeding floor for conspiracies about courageous cosmonauts who sacrificed themselves for the glory of the Soviet state solely to be unceremoniously airbrushed from historical past for his or her failures. However whereas the Soviet Union was responsible of many crimes and cover-ups, the overwhelming physique of proof factors to the phantom or misplaced cosmonauts being little greater than an elaborate fiction. The reality is no manned house launches have been tried previous to April 12, 1961. Yuri Gagarin was – and stays – the primary man to journey into house.

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