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Three Russian Space Shot Deaths-- Pre-Gagarin?
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*)."
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.
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.
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
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
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.
hawk
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 posted the front page 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.
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 confirms 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...
(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.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Two engineers from Bell Aerospace systems submitted a plan 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...
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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)
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.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
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.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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.
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...
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!"
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.
Best Slashdot Co
So do the ranks of anti-abortionists. And the environmental movement. And most other movements. Any group is 10% composed of idiots.
Best Slashdot Co
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/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Amen ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think if you will peruse either Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica 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.
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]
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...
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"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
Come on! Do you honestly think governments would lie to their own people?
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
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.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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
[o]_O
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
"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
360 degrees of Karma
But ours blew up on the front page.
Thank you for reading this comment.
You should get out (or in?) more often. FOX has an entire hour devoted to that crap.
Thank you for reading this comment.
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?
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!