Soviet space program conspiracy accusations
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Lost Cosmonauts or Phantom Cosmonauts are cosmonauts that allegedly entered outer space and records of their voyages were kept confidential or destroyed altogether. There is some evidence supporting these assertions although it is disputed. Even with access to published Soviet archive material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged. The stories were also enlivened by Cold War rivalry and propaganda. James Oberg researched disasters in the Soviet Union and found no evidence of these "lost" cosmonauts (Oberg 1988:156-76).
Although Yuri Gagarin is probably the first man to survive space travel, there are accusations that the Soviets launched at least two humans into orbit prior to Gagarin, but both cosmonauts died en route or in orbit. Another is said to have landed off-course and then been held by the Chinese government. The Soviet government then supposedly suppressed this information to prevent bad publicity for their space program.
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[edit] Supposed incidents in space
[edit] Presumed lost in sub-orbital flights
An article published in the English language edition of Pravda [1] in April 2001, 40 years after Gagarin's successful orbit, gave some details about three cosmonauts reputed to have been lost in earlier missions.
- Aleksei Ledovsky (late 1957)
- Serenti Shiborin (February 1958)
- Andrei Mitkov (January 1959)
- Ivan Kachur (27 September 1960)
- Piotr Dolgov (11 October 1960)
- Alexis Graciov (December 1960)
[edit] 15 May 1960. Unknown person
Robert A. Heinlein wrote in his 1960 article "'Pravda' means 'Truth'" (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that on 15 May 1960, while traveling in the Soviet Union, in Vilnius (mistakenly called by its Polish name "Wilno" throughout the article; Vilnius is far away from Soviet rocket launch sites), he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day it was denied by officials and that no issues of the Pravda national newspaper could be found in Vilnius, or reportedly, other Soviet cities. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch (later said to be unmanned) on that day but the retro-rockets had fired while the vehicle was in the wrong altitude, so recovery efforts were unsuccessful. [2]
According to Gagarin's biography[1] these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions, equipped with dummies and tape recordings of the human voice (to check if the radio worked), that were made in the period just before Gagarin's flight.
According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, on 15 May 1960 Sputnik 4 with "a self-sustaining biological cabin with a dummy of a man" was launched. [3]
[edit] 1961. Ludmila ?
[edit] February, 1961.Gennady Mikhailov
[edit] 2 February 1961. Unknown person
Thought to be male (alleged first human in orbit), most likely died in orbit due to heart failure. This rumor may be derived from reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7 (launched 4 Feb, not 2) was a manned mission. In fact, it was a failed Venus probe.
[edit] 23 March 1961. Valentin Bondarenko
One of the incidents that fuels the "lost cosmonaut" stories is the death of Valentin Bondarenko. A member of the original cosmonaut program, Bondarenko died in a training accident on the ground, when a high-oxygen pressurised chamber he was in caught fire, on 23 March 1961. He was erased from official Soviet pictures and descriptive materials of their cosmonaut program, leading to all manners of speculation about him, and other cosmonauts whose histories were less than perfectly known. The true nature of his accident was not revealed until the 1980s.
[edit] 7 April 1961. Vladimir Ilyushin
Vladimir Ilyushin, son of the Russian airplane designer Sergey Ilyushin, was a Soviet pilot and is purported to have been a cosmonaut who is alleged by some to actually have been the first man in space on 7 April 1961, an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on 12 April.
The theories surrounding this alleged orbital flight are that a failure aboard the spacecraft caused controllers to bring the descent capsule down several orbits earlier than intended, which resulted in its landing in the People's Republic of China whereupon the pilot was held by Chinese authorities for a year before being returned to the Soviet Union. The international embarrassment that would have resulted from having their pilot held is cited as the Soviets' reason for not publicizing this flight and instead focusing their adulation on the subsequent successful flight of Yuri Gagarin.
However, there are reasons to disbelieve this allegation, notably that although both were Communist governments, relations between the Soviets and Chinese were strained, and the propaganda value to the Chinese of a Soviet pilot captured flying over their territory would have given little reason for Chinese complicity in a cover-up.
The theory was lent some credibility in a documentary about the subject in 2004. Sergei Khrushchev (the son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) said that it was true and Vladimir Ilyushin was actually held in China for over a year as a "guest" of the People's Republic of China. He was returned later to the Soviet Union but by then the Gagarin legend was in full swing and the bizarre incident was covered up. The main reason was not to let the USA see the schism between China and the USSR. He gave the interview in English.
This theory was originated on 10 April 1961, by Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and was based on the actual Ilyushin's cure course in China. According to many Russian sources, including the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 11 July 2005, although Ilyushin was a famous test pilot he was never involved in the space program. On 5 June 1960 his legs had been seriously injured in a car accident, and Ilyushin underwent a cure for a year in Moscow and then was sent for a rehabilitation course into China, Hangzhou, where there were specialists in oriental medicine [4] [5] [6]. This explanation was also confirmed by a Soviet defector Leonid Vladimirov, an engineer, who had personal contacts with Ilyushin in 1960, in his 1973 book "The Russian Space Bluff", published in Frankfurt [7] (Russian translation of the book).
Also, Vladimir Ilyushin, who currently lives in Russia, never did confirm this theory.
[edit] 15 May, 1962. Alexis Belokoniov
[edit] ?. V. Zavadovsky
[edit] Cultural references
The lost cosmonauts are referred to in pop culture including science fiction and videogames.
The Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater characters of The Boss and The Fury were fictional but noteworthy lost astronaut/cosmonauts.
There are also references to stranded Russian astronauts in UK comics. A 1989 installment of Philip Bond's "Wired World" published in the UK comics anthology Deadline features a cosmonaut who crash lands in a park in London where the main characters are picnicking. He goes drinking with them then phones his mother, and is later grabbed by men in black, presumably KGB officers. There is also a character called Yuri in Grant Morrison's 2000 AD series "Really And Truly" circa 1992, who wears a space suit all the time and has the strength of seventeen men.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Bizony, Piers (1998). Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin. Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-3688-0.
- James Oberg (1988). Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost, Random House, ISBN 0-394-56095-7
