Did Soviet cosmonauts die before Gagarin?
Pravda is claiming that Yuri Gagarin was not, after all, the first human being in space. The Russian news agency now says that he was merely the first human being to come back alive.
And there are those, it seems, who even question that.
"Pravda" means "Truth-" a quality not historically associated with the agency's assertions. That being the case, its claims should always be taken with a cartload of salt. But it's hard to see an ulterior motive in the story claiming that three Soviet cosmonauts named Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov died in failed sub-orbital flights in 1957, 1958, and 1959, respectively. It should be noted that Sputnik I- the first artificial satellite- was only placed into orbit in 1957; apparently, if the Pravda story is true, the Soviets started trying to put human beings into space almost immediately thereafter!
Rumors of failed Soviet attempts to send human beings into space prior to Gagarin have persisted for decades, fueled by the claims of a pair of Italian brothers named Achille and Giovanni Batista Judica-Cordiglia, who claim to have monitored Soviet space transmissions from a station in the hills outside Turin. According to the brothers, vital signs from a Col. Piotr Ivanovitch (which sounds suspiciously more like a patronymic than a last name) were monitored for about thirty minutes on Oct. 11, 1960; the same is claimed of an unknown cosmonaut on Feb. 2, 1961. Supposedly on Apr. 7, 1961- a mere five days before Gagarin's flight- a capsule containing a cosmonaut named Vassilievitch Dowodovsky stopped transmitting signals several minutes after lift-off.
A webpage called The Lost Cosmonauts details these claims and others- including suggestions that it was not Gagarin after all, but Vladimir Illyushin, who was the first man to orbit the earth and survive (only to be badly injured on landing- an event that took place in China, according to the story, which supposedly detained him for a number of years); and that on May 23, 1961- nearly a year before Valentina Tereshkova became the first "official" woman in space, and 22 years before Sally Ride became the first female American astronaut- an unnamed woman cosmonaut died during an emergency re-entry when oxygen supplies began to fail. A transcript of her alleged last moments, translated into English, can be found here.
Three days later, on May 26, 1961, TASS reported that a large, previously unannounced Soviet satellite had burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Ironically, the announcement came on Sally Ride's tenth birthday.
HT: MarsBlog
ADDENDUM: Here is an article by James Oberg taking the opposite view of these events as that presented at The Lost Cosmonauts- where, btw, I found the link to it.
And there are those, it seems, who even question that.
"Pravda" means "Truth-" a quality not historically associated with the agency's assertions. That being the case, its claims should always be taken with a cartload of salt. But it's hard to see an ulterior motive in the story claiming that three Soviet cosmonauts named Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov died in failed sub-orbital flights in 1957, 1958, and 1959, respectively. It should be noted that Sputnik I- the first artificial satellite- was only placed into orbit in 1957; apparently, if the Pravda story is true, the Soviets started trying to put human beings into space almost immediately thereafter!
Rumors of failed Soviet attempts to send human beings into space prior to Gagarin have persisted for decades, fueled by the claims of a pair of Italian brothers named Achille and Giovanni Batista Judica-Cordiglia, who claim to have monitored Soviet space transmissions from a station in the hills outside Turin. According to the brothers, vital signs from a Col. Piotr Ivanovitch (which sounds suspiciously more like a patronymic than a last name) were monitored for about thirty minutes on Oct. 11, 1960; the same is claimed of an unknown cosmonaut on Feb. 2, 1961. Supposedly on Apr. 7, 1961- a mere five days before Gagarin's flight- a capsule containing a cosmonaut named Vassilievitch Dowodovsky stopped transmitting signals several minutes after lift-off.
A webpage called The Lost Cosmonauts details these claims and others- including suggestions that it was not Gagarin after all, but Vladimir Illyushin, who was the first man to orbit the earth and survive (only to be badly injured on landing- an event that took place in China, according to the story, which supposedly detained him for a number of years); and that on May 23, 1961- nearly a year before Valentina Tereshkova became the first "official" woman in space, and 22 years before Sally Ride became the first female American astronaut- an unnamed woman cosmonaut died during an emergency re-entry when oxygen supplies began to fail. A transcript of her alleged last moments, translated into English, can be found here.
Three days later, on May 26, 1961, TASS reported that a large, previously unannounced Soviet satellite had burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Ironically, the announcement came on Sally Ride's tenth birthday.
HT: MarsBlog
ADDENDUM: Here is an article by James Oberg taking the opposite view of these events as that presented at The Lost Cosmonauts- where, btw, I found the link to it.
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