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First Man To Walk In Space Reveals How Mission Nearly Ended In Disaster
wired_parrot writes Nearly fifty years after the first spacewalk by soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, he's given a rare interview to the BBC revealing how the mission very nearly ended in disaster. Minutes after he stepped into space, Leonov realised his suit had inflated like a balloon, preventing him from getting back inside. Later on, the cosmonauts narrowly avoided being obliterated in a huge fireball when oxygen levels soared inside the craft. And on the way back to Earth, the crew was exposed to enormous G-forces, landing hundreds of kilometres off target in a remote corner of Siberia populated by wolves and bears.
I always thought landing in an area surrounded by wolves and bears was part of the typical mission plan for Russian cosmonauts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The interview is neat, but this isn't anything being "revealed"- all these details were already known. You'll see them mentioned in many books discussing early space flight. They are I think mentioned for example in Buzz Aldrin's "Men from Earth".
I doubt that Mars One colonists will need to deal with wolves and bears after landing.
If you see the Russian spacecraft, it's amazing how determined they were to compete, relatively successfully with the US space program, despite the fact that their manufacturing capabilities were not really up to the task. But they used whatever they had, and pushed hard. So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination. It was particularly striking with how they got a third astronaut into their two-man ship, so they matched Apollo, by taking the third man and jamming him in upside down. They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight, so he had the incentive to actually make it work. And their venus probes - those guys just didn't give up! But definitely playing by different rules than the US - after a vehicle failure, and we shut everything down and analyzed to make it safer. With the Russians, a vehicle failure meant re-writing the history books (to remove the failed flight, erase astronauts from photos, etc.) and launching _more_.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Perhaps the first Mars One flight could have bears and wolves on board. These would be released (in special space suits) just prior to the human settlers, who will then have to battle these animals for food and survival. Mars One is just a reality show after all, and this would make for some great* television.
I doubt that Mars One colonists will have to deal much with anything, by the way. My guess is that the people behind the venture have no plans to actually launch a single vehicle, but have a whole range of reality shows planned for "selecting" the "astronauts". They're probably just waiting for a network to pick them up, or for Endemol to buy the concept.
*) for some definitions of "great"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
...is how when I first read about this back in the late '80s it was not "wolves and bears".
It was A wolf, reported by the rescuers as "going in their direction".
To which the cosmonauts, knowing what they've just been through, laughed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens