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Space

Three Russian Space Shot Deaths-- Pre-Gagarin? 160

Posted by timothy from the vast-conspiracy dept.
Guppy06 writes: "According to this Interfax article, a senior engineer with Experimental Design Office 456 has come forward stating that the USSR attempted launching test pilots on parabolic trajectories (like what American Alan Shepard did in 1961) three different times in 1957, '58, and '59. According to Mikhail Rudenko, after losing test pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov, the Soviets decided to start giving their cosmonauts special space-flight training, as well as deciding to forget the parabolas and try to reach orbit. Unfortunately, Mr. Rudenko seems to have neglected to tell us how this has yet to turn up in papers released by the CIA or KGB, or about how exactly these three died (on the pad? Re-entry?), but it seems to have a little more meat than the usual conspiracy theories (*cough* fake moon landing *cough*)."
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Three Russian Space Shot Deaths-- Pre-Gagarin? More

Three Russian Space Shot Deaths-- Pre-Gagarin?

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  • I think he's saying that this has more meat to it than the fake moon landing conspiracy theories.
  • Yess.... the left == communists. That's right....
  • I remember several years back Final Frontier magazine had a little sidebar on the Gagarin story saying that there was a relatively safe spaceflight before Gagarin, by Vladimir Illushyn (I forget how it's spelled, but he's related to the aircraft designer). He managed to survive the flight, but looked like crap, and so they couldn't really show him off very well. But Gagarin came back just fine, so they used him instead.

  • Re:nyet (Score:1)

    by torpor ( 458 )
    You are beautiful.

  • Sure you can cut the budget. In fact there isn't a need for any supply rockets. Just grab someone from death row who has exhausted all appeals, send them up with plenty of seed. If he can make anything grow on the moon, good for him, let him leave there forever. If not, he is a criminal who would die anyway, now he gets into history books.

  • Okay, who keeps modding this guy up?

    He's obviously trolling, and you're only encouraging the signal degradation around here.

    Please, stop it.

    (The sad thing is I have mod points right now, but I've only got 3 left, and he can post infinitely, which given the evidence, he probably will.)

    Don Negro

  • He is right. "skidding" the atmosphere would only make you lose energy, and will accelerate you towards the surface of Earth.

    It's not that simple. You will convert energy to heat, and your average altitude will be lower. However, if your orbit was eccentric (common for reentry), instead of losing enough energy to actually reenter, you will end up in a more circular, lower total energy, non-reentry orbit.

    This happens more or less the same way a skipping stone transfers forward momentum to upward momentum with a loss to the water and heat with each skip.

    The orbit you end up with would probably be 'inconvieniantly' long lived when compared to oxygen supply. It is reasonable to guess that all fuel would have been exhausted at this point attempting to make the reentry steep enough to succeed.

  • The soviet space program has already been caught in plenty of coverups and orwellian rewriting of the past. This tale is consistent with the others save for one small detail: they tended to do the job poorly, allowing the cat to get out of the bag. This led to entire books using released soviet information to document the frauds--using the same picture twice, but with non-persons airbrushed out, adding an escape system to a rocket (done in *pencil* on a photograph, for crying out loud) to show that their systems were safer than ours after one of ours blew, etc.


    hawk

  • We were more offended by the reds at that time, and more willing to call a spade a spade. This is before the gullible class started selling the line that the communists were peace loving, that our system was not better than theirs, etc.


    hawk, who still refers to "Red China," and will be boycotting all mainland chinese goods for a full year [ironically, that tends to mean buying taiwanese, as with my daughter's scooter last week. The *sole* reason I didn't by the first one was the act of war followed by terrorism]

  • In this story [slashdot.org], Slashdot posted the front page [nasa.gov] to the Huntsville Times from the day that Yuri Gagarin was launched into space. In it, you can clearly see the headline "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died" (lower center of page). It has long been thought that the Soviets lost some astronauts during their initial test flights. The American media has yet to get their hands on any rock-hard evidence, though.
  • comes from Robert Heinlein's 1960 essay, "PRAVDA" means "TRUTH":

    About noon on Sunday, May 15, we were walking downhill through the park surrounding the castle that dominates Vilno. We encountered a group of six or eight Red Army cadets. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Vilno. Almost no tourists go there. So they stopped and we chatted, myself through our guide and my wife directly, in Russian.


    Shortly one of the cadets asked us what we thought of their new manned rocket. We answered that we had had no news lately -- what was it and when did it happen? He told us, with the other cadets listening and agreeing, that the rocket had gone up that very day, and at that very moment a Russian astronaut was in orbit around the earth -- and what did we think of that?

    I congratulated them on this wonderous achievement but, privately, felt a dull sickness. The Soviet Union had beaten us to the punch again. But later that day our guide looked us up and carefully corrected the story: The cadet had been mistaken, the rocket was not manned.

    That evening we tried to purchase Pravda. No copies were available in Vilno. Later we heard from other Americans that Pravda was not available in other cities in the USSR that evening -- this part is hearsay, of course. We tried also to listen to the Voice of America. It was jammed. We listened to some Soviet radio stations but heard no mention of the rocket.

    This is the rocket the Soviets tried to recover and later admitted they had had some trouble with the retrojets; they had fired while the rocket was in the wrong attitude.

    So what is the answer? Did that rocket contain only a dummy, as the pravda now claims? Or is there a dead Russian revolving in space? an Orwellian "unperson," once it was realized that he could not be recovered.

    I am sure of this: At noon on May 15 a group of Red Army cadets were unanimously positive that the rocket was manned. That pravda did not change until later that afternoon.


    I'm not sure what to think. Heinlein's opinion of the Soviet Union was unabashedly critical; but it's not like I'd be any more trusting of official 1960s USSR reports.

    The Encyclopedia Astronautica [astronautix.com] confirms [friends-partners.org] that a Vostok program (the first Russian manned spaceflight) launch did occur on that day, and that it was pushed into a higher orbit when its retrorockets were fired at an incorrect attitude. The Astronautica claims that the launch was intended to test the spacecraft systems, that it was unmanned, and that it was unrecoverable because the heat shield had not been installed. If it lacked a heat shield, then it certainly wasn't a manned flight. But if they were testing reentry by firing the retrorockets, I don't understand why they wouldn't install the heat shield on the vehicle.

    I think the "military cadets didn't know what they were talking about" theory is much more likely than the alternative "Heinlein made up some anti-Soviet propaganda" or "the Soviets killed a man, then tried launching dogs for a year until they felt confident to try a manned launch again" theories... but there's nothing quite so entertaining as a good conspiracy theory, is there? And the spacecraft components eventually did reenter, at a random attitude where they would burn up with or without heat shielding, so we'll never really know...
  • Have you been taking a few too many drugs, me lad?

    you caught me. yes i have.
  • "the Red Grissom"? Gimme a break. American political discourse was all learned from certain Senate Subcommittees.

    What attracted people like #442009 to /. in the first place?

  • trade (Score:1)

    by bgue ( 4676 )
    trade with a backward country is aid

    Heh, Canada is undeniably charitable to the States then. :)

  • There will be no rest, no surrender, no slackening of pace nor weakening of will. In our lifetimes, the USA will again be a just and Godly nation

    Whose god? Papa Legba? (Not a troll, btw. The USA is a multi-cultural society therefore there is no way ever that you will become a "Godly nation" you've got way too many religions active to be able to impose a state religion.

    From there, the rest is inevitable. God will return to His rightful place in our Nation.

    Heh. Refer to your history textbooks. The opposite of that is true.

    (FYI, I support abortion. So would you if you knew more women who trusted you enough to tell you the truth about their childhoods)
  • Maybe you've been brainwashed about Greenpeace, but my suspicion is that a whole lot of folk in BC regard them with a degree of suspicion and dislike... and we are, if nothing else, a whale-luvin' sort of province.

    That said, Greenpeace has been caught out in its lies about logging, and we're pissed. Oh, yah, we're well aware of how fubar'd the logging regulations are -- but we also know Greenpeace lies a whole lot about it all.

    Go away, Greenpeace; we'll take care of the problem ourselves.

    --

  • Other russian propaganda missions (Score:3)

    by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @06:35AM (#287212) Homepage
    (This is from memory so the details may not be entirely correct. Originally from the book "From the Earth To The Moon" by Buz Aldrin)

    The first near approach in space was done by simply launching two rockets from the same site at an interval which is a multiple of the orbit period. This made the americans think that the russians were way ahead of them in developing space rendezvous capability.

    The first mission with three crew members on board was done with a ship designed for two and a very skinny third crew member (an engineer, not a cosmonaut). Comonauts would usually leave the craft and lan with their personal parachutes - remember that the russians do not land at sea. On this improvised setup their couldn't do this. Without water to cushion the landing they had to hope that the final landing retrorockets would fire just before touchdown or they would be crushed.

    Leonov's spacewalk nearly ended in disaster when his suit started to bulge from its internal pressure and seriously limited his ability to move.

    On the russian spacewalks, a foldable "tent" was used to block the hatch so the interior of the ship will remain pressurized - the vacuum tube electronics could not withstand exposure to vacuum and would probably crack from thermal shock.

    On an aborted countdown a general insisted that the rocket be serviced while it is fully loaded with propellant so it might still make the launch window. It exploded on the pad killing many technicians.

    Unlike the alleged pre-Gagarins these extreme risks taken under pressure from politicians are well documented.

    -

  • One way moon mission (Score:5)

    by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @10:40PM (#287213) Homepage
    Two engineers from Bell Aerospace systems submitted a plan [aol.com] to NASA in 1962 for a one-way manned moon mission in order to beat the russians. The astronaut would have no means of immediate return and would be sustained on the moon by a series of supply rockets until the technology for a return mission is developed.

    This wasn't a joke. These engineers were serious.

    The 1962 book "The Pilgrim Project" by Hank Searle and the 1968 movie "Countdown" were based on this plan.

    It seems to me that such a plan would not only have been a way to beat the russians but also a very effective budget ratchet - you can't cut the budget with a man stranded on the moon...

    -
  • a suborbital parabola is cheaper in energy than an orbital hyperbola while still allowing the nation that fired the shot to have claimed that it reached space
    Not to mention that both the USSR and the US already had rockets made to fly a parabolic suborbital trajectory. They're called ICBMs.
  • If the Soviets had launched 3 guys and killed them all, you bet the US intelligence services would make sure every time that it hit the press .. the propaganda benefit would have been irresistible (i.e. Communists kill another cosmonaut)
  • (a felon cannot hold public office)

    Thats just not true.

    Surfing the net and other cliches...
  • But when the majority didn't voted for you (check the number of vote) you have to be carefull.

    Interestingly enough the majority didn't vote for Bill Clinton either. Neither in 1992 nor 1996. Due to H. Ross Perot acting as spoiler and splitting the right and moderate vote, Clinton managed to be elected with no more than 42% of the popular vote or so compared to 38 or 39% for George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole. Had Perot not run in either case it is highly unlikely Clinton would have won given that Perot took a lot more votes away from the Republican candidate than from Clinton.

    To be fair, it was Ralph Nader who cost Al Gore the election, acting as spoiler, he got more than the narrow margin of victory's worth of votes in Florida, and it is likely Gore would have won Florida had Nader not been running.

    I believe that G.W. Bush actually got a bigger percentage of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in either '92 or '96, despite narrowly losing the popular vote (Perot got a lot more votes than Nader did). Of course, as we all know, it is the Electoral College that matters...

  • To be able to go above the atmosphere without the fuel/energy cost of achieving orbit.
    Look at the early Mercury/Redstone shots, or the X-15 program for more on these kind of trajectories on their purpose - short answer: a suborbital parabola is cheaper in energy than an orbital hyperbola while still allowing the nation that fired the shot to have claimed that it reached space.
  • Troll.....

    I can't believe people are replying to this gibberish.

    Troll score: +3
    * Reference to McCarthy +3
    * Reference to Quisling +1
    * Reference to abortion and murder -1
    * Reply from the guy who said he'd publish abortion methods +3
    * Use of effective bolding techniques +2
    * Referring to Hitler -1
    * Replying to own troll -1 * 4 = -4
  • why would someone wish to be launched on a parabolic trajectory?

    Do you think we're gonna ask you whether you like it or not? Will just take you and launch you into the space without asking anything.

    -"Death by launching into the space" advocacy team

  • The pilot's name was Tupolev, son of the Tupolev who started the OKB of the same name in the Soviet Union. Reportedly, his flight was a success, but he came down in Central China instead. The Chinese held him for a year and held onto the capsule. Tupolev was returned, but I don't know about the capsule. Korolev was ordered to deny any knowledge of the flight.

    Gagarin was picked a month later and completed his flight successfully, landing in Central Siberia.
  • The 41st anniversiary of Admiral Shepherd's Mercury 7 flight is May 5th.

    Just out of curiosity, are there any slashdot readers who worked on historical engineering projects such as Mercury? I think a "Slashdot Stories" section where (older? older than me, at least!) readers could share stories and experience would be fasinating.

    --
    jvev atvf gurm rabs pern gvba

  • Oops, typo. That should be Admiral Shepard.

    --
    jvev atvf gurm rabs pern gvba

  • Actually it is not all the hard to out run an H-Bomb. Atomic wepons tend to come with drag chutes to slow down that bomb so that the Bomber can get away. The US dropped a multi-megaton device from a B-52 with out the loose of the plane. The Russians drop I think a 5o megaton device from a freaking Bear. Now the Bear is very fast for a prop plane but it is sub sonic.
  • Myh mom (she was in highschool when sputnik was launched) told me about pre Gagarin flights for
    years. Basically the story goes, that you could
    pick up on a ham radio the radio transmissions
    of from the doomed cosmonauts. Basically they were steuck up there, and couldn't return.
    Supposably you could also hear their heartbeat (well at least the *beep* *beep* *beep* of the
    EKG). My mom said that it was reported in the
    papers when this happened, but I never heard anything about it except from her.

    The idea of the Ruskies launching men before the
    technology was ready plays into the heartless commie stereotype of the red scare.

    While this whole story strikes me as plausable, without collaborating evidence, it's still just urban legend.
  • (*cough* fake moon landing *cough*)
    Wait . . . the moon landing was fake?!?

    ---

  • Re:Vladimir Illushyn (Score:3)

    by simong ( 32944 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:22AM (#287227) Homepage
    I first heard about this last week from a link to here [lostcosmonauts.com] from this story [slashdot.org]. The bits about picking up a dying cosmonaut's last breath and a female cosmonaut burning up on reentry seem a little difficult to believe but the story of Vladimir Illushyn's flight appears to have been completely vindicated recently. There's even this programme [adlermediatv.com] about him, which was shown on the UK Horizons [ukhorizons.co.uk] digital TV station on Wednesday night last week. On the other hand, the story about launches in 1958 does seem a little fanciful.
  • Contrary to a certain old James Bond movie, it's a real bitch to hide a space launch. About the only man-made phenomena that's brighter or noisier than a launch is a nuclear blast (similar amount of energy involved for the larger rockets). Have you ever seen a man-made sunrise?
    They're visible from most of Florida and good chunks of Georgia (including populous cities like Orlando and Savannah). They go right over international waters (giving interested parties like the Soviets the ability to sit and watch them up close). The ony option the USAF and NASA has to cover up the launches from Cape Canaveral is to neglect to tell the press what the payload was.

    They are also very visible from orbit, Russia and China undoubtedly have similar ICBM launch detection facilities to those operated by NORAD.
    You can probably get some idea of the payload from the flight path of the rocket and it's type as well as the RCS of whatever it places in orbit.
  • During the period in question (1961-1966), dozens of rockets were launched at Cape Canaveral, in the broad light of day. A few were well-publicized manned fligths; the rest were billed as "unmanned test shots".

    Including craft pefectly capable of having crews. How do you tell if there is anyone in the command module of an Apollo capsule?
    Were any launches (or orbits) detected which correspond with these alleged manned Russian attempts.
  • Before the Gagarin launch, they did actually check that they could get someone up there by launching wooden mannequins

    This it's possible that if they did kill someone on an early flight they'd want people to think they had launched a mannequin.

  • Re:yeah, (Score:2)

    by mpe ( 36238 )
    Not that aircraft with bombs weren't enough to fuck over the world . . . Its just that it wasn't safe for pilots to drop really large nuclear weapons (i.e. some would wimp out, cause outrunning a H bomb is not really easy in an aircraft.)

    It would be impossible to outrun the initial flash, thus all sorts of techniques to ensure pilots don't get blinded. Also the only way to outrun the blast would be in something like an FB-111, assuming sufficent fuel to run the afterburners for long enough. Even then you run into problems with multiple bombers...
  • >> Imipolex-G

    Hah. A Pynchon reading troll

    ----
  • Look at the facts: if it went up X distance and then came down, that means it didn't have enough energy to hit Earth's escape velocity. So how, praytell, did it get enough energy from skidding off the atmosphere to go into deep space?

    Secondly, there are hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers worldwide who scan the skies every night with telescopes. If such a capsule did exist, why didn't the worldwide amateur astronomical community spot it?

    Someone was yanking your chain.

    There are no marooned space capsules in orbit. If there were, there'd be Web sites devoted to "Enter your latitude and longitude and receive the time of day when the Russian Graveyard flies overhead!"
  • Christa McAuliffe coming to our school the week after her flight

    After her flight? That must have been extremely freaky. I know that if I had seen her coming into a room I was in a week after the flight I would have run screaming for the door.

  • the ranks of abortionists throng with petty criminals, violent psychopaths, and the like

    So do the ranks of anti-abortionists. And the environmental movement. And most other movements. Any group is 10% composed of idiots.

  • Actually it works pretty well most of the time, which is why people keep using it.

    Well, I must disagree. It works very poorly, and that's a large part of the reason why political discourse in this country is so pathetic, mostly consisting of name-calling, finger-pointing, and scare-mongering.

    When there's only two sides, everyone who's not for you is against you. With a multidimensional view, you can see that those who oppose you on some issues are allies on others.

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • The Freedom of Information Act was designed by liberals to harass honest government officials in their attempts to combat subversion -- but in the end, the sword has two edges, and the FOIA has struck a few blows for the Truth as well.

    What is it with the trend for /. trolls these days to include some babble about "liberals"? I thought that the "liberal as boogeyman" bit went out with Reagan. But then, it looks like the '00s are going to be the '80s all over again - I see kids with Mohawk haircuts, both Prince and the Go-Gos are touring this summer, there's a Crocodile Dundee movie coming out, and an incompetent Republican pretending to be president.

    Anyway, for those of you scoring the trolls at home: try a Google search on "Imipolex-G". You might also note that MK-ULTRA involved "mind control" via LSD. (No, I'm not making that up, and it is an extremely fucked up story.)

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • The extreme left of the political scale is communism, and the extreme right is facism.

    Two dimensional thinking is a poor way to conceive of political views.

    Leftists beleive in an economic system based on labor. Rightists beleive in an economic system based on capital. Both leftists and rightists come in libertarian and authoritarian, free-market and command-economy, isolationist and interventionist, and green and industrial flavors. You really need several axes.

    Some of these combinations are more common then others, to be sure. But political philosophy is an essay question, not multiple choice.

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • "hawk, who still refers to "Red China," and will be boycotting all mainland chinese goods for a full year"

    Good luck.
  • If this is a troll, it sure is funny.

    "Your time is done. The future is ours."

    YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO ESCAPE! MAKE YOUR TIME! FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
  • > Supposably you could also hear their heartbeat (well at least the *beep* *beep* *beep* of the EKG).

    All legends have a grain of truth in the center.

    Theory: The "beep, beep, beep" was just the onboard telemetry saying "yeah, the spacecraft's alive". IOW, a "heartbeat" for the spacecraft. Some enterprising journalist heard the term "heartbeat" and assumed it to be a human heartbeat. (Or an EKG representing one...)

    Human nature took care of the rest. It's not a far cry from "heartbeat" [of a spacecraft, in the telemetry sense] to "heartbeat" [of an EKG attached to a human], to "you could hear their heartbeat" [the lub-dub sound of blood going through a heart, as though someone hooked up the mic to a stethoscope]

  • > Unlike the alleged pre-Gagarins these extreme risks taken under pressure from politicians are well documented.

    Hear, hear.

    Of course, we're not immune either (and you didn't imply we were :)

    "Sure, we can launch the shuttle in this freezing cold. How bad could it be?"

  • Re:X-15 not parabolic - wrong (Score:3)

    by cmuncey ( 66980 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:33PM (#287244)
    I think if you will peruse either Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica [astronautix.com] or the various history articles on NASA's web site (look up the URL's yourself) you will find that there were two different flight profiles for the X-15. In both cases, the powered segment was generally quite brief, running around 80 to 120 seconds of and 8 to 12 minuite flight. The high speed profile was 'relatively' flat, as you state. But the high altitude profile, which resulted in the 62 mile altitude you refer to, is described as a ballistic trajectory, the central three minuites or so required use of reaction controls to maintain stability, as aerodynamic controls no longer worked at the extreme altitudes involved. One approximate description of a suborbital ballistic trajectory is parabolic.
  • Please read books before you quote them.
    The black book of communism totals all the dead from the Russian civil war, the famines, the Chinese civil was, the Chinese famines, oh, and the million or so Cambodians the Pol Pot offed. As for the Gulag Archipelago, either you missed a decimal place, or you are just making numbers up.
    You also seem to conflate the Soviet Union with Communism everwhere. Moscow might have liked it that way, but that was simply not the case.

    This is not to say that the USSR was not a repressive totalitarian state that had no qualms about the use of violence on its citizens, but please don't just invent numbers to back up a pithy subject line.

  • Chinese manned space flight (Score:5)

    by TMB ( 70166 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @07:06PM (#287246)
    This has come to mind a lot concerning Chinese manned space flight, which is expected to happen sometime within the next 5 years.

    Would they announce an attempt beforehand? Or would they wait and see if it were successful first? The Americans could never afford the luxury of waiting to see if it were successful before they told the public it was happening because of the potential outcry, but the Chinese could conceivably do it. It's unlikely, but they may have already tried (and failed) to launch someone into space. The Chinese government has certainly been priming the world to expect an attempt within the next year or two.

    I wonder how much a Chinese astronaut (anyone know what the Chinese version of astronaut/cosmonaut would be?) would kick the USA into being more ambitious about the manned space program?

    [TMB]
  • Several years ago, a ham radio operator told me that some russian cosmonauts bounced off the earth's atmosphere in the late 1960's. Apparently, they tried to reenter at just the wrong angle and "skidded" off the atmosphere into deep space without any way of returning. According to the source, ham operators worldwide were able to eavesdrop on the related radio activity (which was the only way the story got out, since the Soviet government at that time still kept secret all news topics that couldn't be reported with a positive spin).

    Recently, a sceptical colleague objected that this was impossible due to the laws of physics. The objector claimed that the craft would have slowed under any circustances because of its momentum and effects of the atmosphere, even if it meant burning up. However, he related a story he had heard much earlier (early 1960's?) in which AM radios, if tuned to a certain channel, could pick up a fading signal of the heartbeat of a marooned astronaut. Yet another acquaintance claimed that is was actually the first female cosmonaut who had been marooned.

    Has any one else heard any more variations of this story? Is this just a reoccuring ham radio "fish story", or is there some factual basis? Also, would an object leaving orbit like that eventually return, even years later?
  • Remember the Huntsville Times [nasa.gov]


    Check the headline: "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died" headline. I can't quite make out the date, but I suspect it's 4-12-61...
    -----

  • I'm hoping someone old enough to actually remember it could tell me whether Reds was less derogatory then. I can't see a newspaper printing "Reds" today. Is this because the use of the world has changed, or because the early 60s was just a weird time?
  • God will return to His rightful place in our Nation.


    Until the mother fucker pays taxes he has no place in our nation.
    Fucking troll


    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • I believe that he is refering to the Fox special about the moon landings being a hoax that there was an article about a couple of weeks ago.
    check out this article [badastronomy.com] on badastronomy.com.
  • Oh well, if it came from Experimental Design Office 456 then it has to be true.
  • James Oberg - who is probably the West's leading expert on the Russian/Soviet program first investigated these rumours over twenty years ago and found no substance to them either then or since - a long extract from a book by him can be found here on the Federation of American Scientists web site [fas.org]. But in summary, there is no substance to the rumors, although cosmonauts did die in training on Earth, washed out of the program, etc, and for political reasons were removed from the official soviet accounts of their space program.

  • . Whether they can figure out docking in orbit is another question entirely...

    1. Their technology is based on tried and tested Russian technology.
    2. The Russians have more experience than anybody else at space docking
    3. Russia is in need of hard currency so I am sure the Chinese could buy the knowledge
    4. Even if the Russians aren't selling or the Chinese aren't buying, the Chinese aren't stupid (they've got this far...)
    I'd say when rather than if.
  • I don't know if this particular story is true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised. During their years in power, the Soviet Communist Party killed somewhere between 25 million (cf: The Black Book of Communism) and 68 million (cf: The Gulag Archipelago) of their own people. (These figures don't include the additional million or so Afghans they killed from 1979-1991.) Next to those mountains of skulls, what's three cosmonauts?

  • It's 1947. The USA is interested in high altitude effects on the human body. Some test pilots have had problems and the jets don't go high enough yet.So they want to use high altitude balloons. It is considered very dangerous and quite likely fatal due to varius unknowns. So they use military prisoners who are willing to "volunteer". One balloon crashes with it's payload and is seen before it is recovered. So a story is spun about weather balloons, covering the story about spying on the Russians, covering the sory about..

  • Come on! Do you honestly think governments would lie to their own people?

  • what the heck is this guy talking about, the united states moon landing? That for sure was real.
  • I would guess at that stage of the cold war, they wouldnt exactly be advertising failures.
    I don't see why not, if the proper spin were applied. As in: "in addition the atomic bomb, the Russians now have a top-secret 'spacekiller' device! Details are sketchy, but rumour has it that no man they've tested it on has lived to tell the tale..." So in addition to growing up terrified of dying in an atomic inferno, KoldwarKids would also have had to fear being sent into space by the Russians.

    --

  • We have satellites dedicated to the task of detecting rocket launches, so that in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviets, they would be unable to launch a sneak attack on us.

    Maybe not so important these days, but the satellites are still there.

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

  • more information please?

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • Do you tell them how many times you scored or how many times you met the hottest chick on the planet and she shot you down like the asshole you were?

    The USSR & the US were involved in one hell of a game, something along the lines of "We will crush you!" If reports had surfaced that they had screwed up three times prior to a successful launch, chances are we wouldn't have been half as scared as we were, and we might not have mobilized as readily to go to the moon. What if those deaths made us think, "Ok, we are NOT spending several billion to send one or two Americans to die in space." (several billion for 55k Americans to die in random Asian spot, gogogo *ahem*)

    The US did most of its space work in the open, and we love hearing about "the Right Stuff." The USSR did most of its stuff in secret, as was perfectly normal with the Communist regime at the time.

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • Every couple of years the russian press publishes stories like that. Nothing new.

    IMHO, Gagarin was the first man in space. An this is why:
    Too many people were invloved in the Soviet space program - thousands and thousands of ordinary people, engineers and technicians, so I don't see any possibility to hide such a big event.

    Also, some well-known people have been working with Korolev Constructors Bureau since early 50-s and they explicitly state - Gagarin was the first cosmonaut. Apparently, there's no reason for them to lie today. The USSR doesn't exist anymore and the KGB (or whatever they call it now) doesn't have enough money and, more important, not enough reasons to support the old Soviet propaganda.

    So, were all those silly conspiracy theories come from? Georgy Grechko, one of the most famous russian cosmonauts, told once, that before Gagarin they often used the "Ivan Ivanovich" dummies for the test launches... Very often, some random witnesses of landing mistook the dummies for dead people. Later, the engineers decided to print the word "DUMMY" on them, to avoid those mistakes :)

    Anyway, it might be one of the roots of the pre-Gagarin cosmonaut legend.

  • why would someone wish to be launched on a parabolic trajectory?

    Because they were waiting in line for 45 minutes, and everybody coming back from the ride said it was worth it.

  • Russia didn't launch a single rocket that the US didn't know about. A rocket launch is kind of a hard thing to hide.

    Before the Gagarin launch, they did actually check that they could get someone up there by launching wooden mannequins. And in 1959, they didn't have a rocket that could carry the weight of a person.

  • My mom (she was in highschool when sputnik was launched) told me about pre Gagarin flights for years. Basically the story goes, that you could pick up on a ham radio the radio transmissions of from the doomed cosmonauts.

    I read such an article in an old Readers Digest that I picked up at a garage sale. Now, you must keep in mind that during that time the Readers Digest was actively collaborating with the CIA to stop the "red menace".

    A quick glance at the rest of the magazine articles illustrated that point handsomely. Most of the stories were peppered with anti-soviet propaganda. To give an example, in the middle of a story that had nothing to do with politics such as a tourist excursion to Texas, they would sneak a comment like "after eating that spicy taco, I felt worse than a prisoner in a soviet gulag"...

  • I can't believe that three moderators fell for this pile of dinosaur manure. What a load of self-contradictory, nonsesical and barely-on-topic ravings. I believe that myself, the moderators and Slashdot as a whole are worse off for having read it.

    --
  • Not trying to be funny at all, but this kind of accident tends not to leave much in the way of a body. If the story is true, then these men were extremely brave and deserve the same sort of recognition that other test pilots who died in the space race were given.

  • Heh (Score:1)

    by Gnight ( 163400 )
    Its always fun to get launched into space at a high velocity.

    And on a personal note, I think it would be more exciting to get launched into space not in a rocket, but by a very large sling-shot device. I'm not sure why, its just that there's something about that picture that cracks me up.

    -Gnight

  • Nobodies gonna read this, but hiding the fact that 3 astronauts died is not really an accomplishment for a government that killed about 50 million people in 20 years.

    Hail mother russia and comrade stalin.

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • propaaganda is awesome, isn't it?
    Though I doubt that a bad taco makes many feel worse than those who were in the gulags... Shitting is fun, but hey, thats mexican for you... The british and russian propaganda was always much better than the us stuff though...

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • You have to remember that Sputnik also went "beep...beep...beep...beep"

    Oh, and as for "heartless commie stereotype", the USSR had

    i.e. locking soldiers into trains so that they could not escape before they reached the battlefields. Or firing on surrendering russian troops was a higher priority than killing germans,
    The fact that Stalin killed more russians/*stanese people than hitler, stuff like that. Lotsa fun stuff that supports the stereotype can be found.

    Yeah, propaganda sucks, but in that dept, the US was trully justified in saying that. Actually, I wonder how much crap the americans/russians sent up in the early years. I'm sure a lot of things went "beep" in the sky back then.

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • but the whole thing behind the "space race" was not some noble shit like getting man into space and going where "no man has gone before". The true reason was " if we can launch a man into space, have him go around the world and land safely", than we have an awesome platform for launching nuclear weapons." If a man returned intact and living, most likely the same thing would happen to a nuclear weapon.

    Not that aircraft with bombs weren't enough to fuck over the world . . . Its just that it wasn't safe for pilots to drop really large nuclear weapons (i.e. some would wimp out, cause outrunning a H bomb is not really easy in an aircraft.)

    The point of this post is that a sub orbital parabola isn't enough to hit something on the other side of the world (in the us's case, russia)

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • I must say you almost pass as human, but one can still spot the unclean creature you truly are...

    Here's some food: Imipolex-G doesn't exist outside of Gravity's Rainbow. Please refer to a chapter in this book. [oup-usa.org]

  • I heard a few years ago from a guy who worked at the aerospace musuem in Huntsville, Alamba that the a lot of early cosmonauts had died.
  • Quisling wasn't a word that Heinlein invented.

    Vidkun Quisling was the wartime leader of the Norwegian NS, which collaborated with the German occupation forces. His name became synonymous with treason.
  • Would they announce an attempt beforehand?

    OK, others have made a similar point, but this bears saying with some emphasis, since the original poster has a 5:

    They had damn well better announce any orbital flight, manned or manned, beforehand. Any projectile with orbital capacity will immediately be detected by NORAD, and its path projected to potential impact sites. It's pretty difficult to do an orbital from China that can't hit the US or NATO. Last I had a peek at the relevant sections of the US SIOP (Single Integrated Operation Plan), this means that an unannounced Chinese orbital shot would bring NORAD to DEFCON 2 within about 30 seconds.

    For those of you who are unfamiliar, this means that the US would have launched strategic bombing forces and be bringing ICBM and submarine forces to launch-ready.

    The President, if available, would then have about a five-minute window to make a launch decision. The Joint Chiefs, and probably some people over at NORAD, have a window of authority to authorize a launch as well, assuming there's no one else available to make the decision.

    The Russians, Ukrainians, ..., and probably the damn Israelis would probably be taking note and making similar decisions. In short, the Chinese are highly unlikely to make an unannounced launch.

    Finally, a historical footnote: the US has managed to reach DEFCON 2 a number of times by mistake, including an incident in which some idiot dropped a training tape in the NORAD computers and managed to hit "play." Fortunately, Reagan wasn't awake at the time, and NORAD no longer conducts training at the Springs :).

  • And we're supposed to believe you because .... you say so? Sorry you're going to have to do better than that. First off, your theory fails the Large Population Conspiracy test, which is that there were thousands of people intimately involved in the space program and yet no one has come forward to expose this conspiracy. Certainly years later, there should have been at least one disgruntled astronaut, engineer, or administrator who would break the silence.
    Even if we assume what you say is correct, it's not clear what benefit there would have been to having a 'secret astronaut' program. Throughout the period, the US and USSR were in a race to be the first in every space accomplishment. Sending up a 'secret' astronaut on a mission that you could never mention and might allow the Soviets to jump ahead of you in public achievements just does not make any sense. By the Gemini program (after 1963), the rockets were much more reliable and there would have been little reason to have secret missions when the odds of success were already so high.
  • Georgy Grechko, one of the most famous russian cosmonauts, told once, that before Gagarin they often used the "Ivan Ivanovich" dummies for the test launches... Very often, some random witnesses of landing mistook the dummies for dead people. Later, the engineers decided to print the word "DUMMY" on them, to avoid those mistakes :)

    Hmph... reminds me of the USAF story that the corpses at Roswell were really crash test dummies. Hey, could be true...

  • Ok, the Russians failed a couple of launches, and then covered up the results. Is anyone surprised? Does anyone care? I guess this is news for nerd, but I'm having a hard time classifying it as "stuff that matters."
  • The 1997 book by James Harford, "Korolev : How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon" seems to cover all the bases of Soviet space flight facts and rumors.

  • The Chinese NASA equivelant is the China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation [casc41.com] - don't bother clicking the English link [casc41.com] all it says is Sorry, We are doing this work now, Please wait a while... ALL YOUR... sorry.

    But seriously there was a press release [cnn.com] back in November 2000 that suggested they would start flights "at the beginning of the 21st century"

    Sometime very soon?

  • Dude,

    Stop trolling the kiddies.

    (In case you are serious " ... and the horse you rode in on.")


  • that is the single stupidest, most uninformed article i have ever read.
  • It is true that a space accident doesn't have to leave that much in the way of a body. However, in all of the major space disasters -- Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger -- there were bodies. Of course, in the Challenger they were hardpressed to figure out if asphyxiation, shock, drowning, etc. was what actually the cause of death, but that's another matter.

    I was more speaking figuratively. If three astronauts were killed, why is it that none of their spouses, friends, mistresses, drinking buddies, hairdressers, etc. haven't whispered about that to their press? At this point, it would be a great benefit to the memory of the astronaut to have them recognized as a pioneer.

    Of course, the Russians did loose a few cosmonauts in training accidents. Most notably in a pure-oxygen cabin accident that would have probably resulted in NASA not using a pure-oxygen cabin for Apollo-1.

    The other thing I realized was that the launch site that was mentioned -- Kapustin Yar -- didn't have a booster that was powerful enough to launch humans until at least 1961. At that point, Gagarin was already launched.

    So they would have to kill all of the friends, destroy the launch pad, destroy the drawings, all records, etc. Likely isn't true.

  • It's all BS. (Score:4)

    by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @07:50PM (#287304) Homepage
    There's a pretty good article at http://www.friends-partners.org/mwade/articles/pha part1.htm [friends-partners.org] about that.

    The experts pretty much agree that it's very very unlikely that the russians could have mounted a suborbital program.

    I personally am inclined to agree with them. They would have turned up a body by now. I suspect that the engineer is looking for cash.

  • Maybe it's the Boy Scout in me. Maybe it's because I still picture Christa McAuliffe coming to our school the week after her flight. It might be because I come from a military family and have been around soldiers my whole life. My country isn't perfect, but it's my country.

    I know it's not because I'm ignorant. I'm one of the most cynical people in the world. I don't trust anyone. I judge people on sight. I look for the bad aspect of every person I meet and I remember that part of them before anything else. Jon Benet's parents had something to do with it. I don't need the proof, I made my decision the moment I saw the news.

    But, when it comes to our space program, I refuse to believe that any of it is faked. When I meet people in our space program, I can see and hear the excitement they have. I can see the child I used to be. I can see myself, without my cynicism, looking up, feeling very small, and letting my imagination go. The space program isn't about getting it right the first time. It's about setting your expectations higher than you can imagine and keeping at it until you get there.

    I have to picture the Soviet engineers, scientists, and children the same way. Maybe their government wanted to keep its people happy and proud. Maybe they saw their children look up the same way I did. Maybe they just wanted to preserve that pride.

    Nobody in these programs has to hide anything. We'll still be proud of the effort.
  • She was supposed, too. Obviously, she didn't.
  • So holding a degree in Russian History I feel compelled is get really annoyed when people make comments like this.

    Firstly, Bolshiviks are different then Communists. W.E.B. DeBouis was a communist. He wasn't a brutal inhuman monster, he was a central figgure in the US civil rights movement, something few people (but the insanely ignorent and bigoted) will be willing to denounce as "brutal [and] inhuman"

    Secondly, equating Bolshivism with US leftism is like equating an M80 with a tacnuke. US leftism embrases the ideals (admitedly corrupted by the politicians that enact them) of egalitarianism and equality. US Leftists don't want to abolish the capitalism system, they don't want to set up a system of single party rule, they don't want to nationalize every single industry in the country, and they certainly don't want to deport the population of say, Georgia, to parts of Siberia (little historical joke there, don't expect the fanatic right winger I'm responding to to get this one).

    Finaly, to equate even Bolshivism, which was the ideological construct utilized by Lenin in his government with the perverted monstrosity that was Stalinism is another classic historical blunder. Stalin's reign of terror over the USSR changed completely and totaly the nature of the government of the country. Khruschev, Stalin's successor, and Premire of the USSR during the period mentioned (1957-1959) was a follower of Stalin's who broke with Stalin shortly after his death (Stalin's that is, not Khruschev's).

    Khruschev's willingness to sacrifice human lives in the interest of science are not really that different then the COUNTLESS crimes our government (as well as the Soviet government) committed against her own citizens. Sending soliders into a nuclear blast zone to test the effects of radiation on troops comes to mind for instance.

    Yes, the USSR was a dictatorship. Yes this is a deploreable and horrid thing. But the arrogance of the American people to assume that our system is that terribly much better then theirs is one of the greatest mistakes this country can make. The USSR has much yet to teach us. For example, before Stalin's death in 1953 the USSR claimed (rightfully) a 100% literacy rate. Pretty impressive for a backwards basicly 3rd world nation. Yes, we won the cold war. Yes, capitalism triumphed. But let's try to learn something from our fallen enemy, rather then continuing to blindly demonize him to prop up our own sordid nation.

    I'm not even going after the obvious abortion trolls.

    This has been another useless post from....
  • It was on TV!!!! FOX, even!!!!!

    Seriously, it lowered my faith in the human race how many people seriously started believing the moon race was a hoax based on one TV show... And then they call me stupid when I tell them that the show is a load of crap...

    Tim

  • nyet (Score:3)

    by deran9ed ( 300694 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @07:12PM (#287315) Homepage

    "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published,"

    Doesn't mean this is any sort of conspiracy by any agency. Have you ever thought that Russian officials were probably embarassed by losing 3 astronauts, and did not want to release their names to avoid bad publicity?

    Or perhaps they never released their names at the time to avoid what they saw as threats, finding out what they were doing in the great space race times. Jumping to conclusions, is like jumping off a cliff, whereas even the great conspiracies have some form of paper trial be it legitimate or not.

    This story just claims Russia lost three astronauts..

    printf "\aShit Happens\n";

    Electro Magnetic Pulse [antioffline.com]
  • But ours blew up on the front page.
  • You should get out (or in?) more often. FOX has an entire hour devoted to that crap.
  • "Would they announce an attempt beforehand?"

    They wouldn't need to. Unlike the USA or former USSR, the Chinese don't have observation stations all around the Earth to keep in contact with their taikonauts when they're not over China. In order to compensate, they have a few specialized frigates (or are they cruisers?) with communications gear that's only useful for talking with spacecraft. Whenever these ships leave port, you can bet foreign spy satellites (even the commercial ones) take note of it.

    Even more damning is the way their launches fly right into NORAD territory.

    "Or would they wait and see if it were successful first?"

    I'm not sure when the People's Daily is allowed to publish information on Shenzhou launches, but the pattern seems to be that Chinese launches are all over the US press either right before or right after launch.

    They could try denying that somebody was aboard, but anybody with a decent radio would be able to find out the truth.

    "anyone know what the Chinese version of astronaut/cosmonaut would be?)"

    The Chinese government refers to them as "yuhangyuan," but the Western press has taken to calling them "taikonauts."

    "kick the USA into being more ambitious about the manned space program? "

    Probably not until they do something that seems to intrude on US pride, like, say, that lunar landing they say they can achieve by 2005. Yeah, that 2005 deadline is probably too ambitious, but not as ambitious as you might think. The Encyclopedia Astronautica [astronautix.com] has this interesting article [friends-partners.org] on their lunar plans.

    In short, instead of building a super-heavy lifter (Saturn V, N1), they intend to launch the taikonauts and lunar landing equipment on two different rockets, to meet up together in orbit. Whether they can figure out docking in orbit is another question entirely...


  • The US did most of its space work in the open . . .

    No, no, no.

    The US did all of its space work that they told you about in the open. Get it? Everything you know about is in the category of "things you know about", yeah, sure -- but so what?!

    In the early and mid 1960's, the liberal Kennedy and Johnson regimes are known to have conducted numerous -- and invariably fatal -- space-related experiments closely linked to MK-ULTRA. Using captured German war rockets, they tested the survival benefits of shielding and insulation made of a number of advanced (for the time) synthetic polymers (e.g. Imipolex-G) obtained from the German IG Farben industrial complex.

    Dozens of brave Americans reported "missing in action" in the early days of the Vietnam conflict were, in fact, incinerated somewhere in the skies over Florida, their last moments accompanied only by the sterile beeping of primitive telemetry.

    They were, at least, permitted to pray.

    The Freedom of Information Act was designed by liberals to harass honest government officials in their attempts to combat subversion -- but in the end, the sword has two edges, and the FOIA has struck a few blows for the Truth as well.

    Ironic, no?

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