The history of astronautics is studded with well-known disasters.
However, the casuistry is so vast that it allows a rational subdivision of the episodes
into at least three categories: disasters predicted but which did not occur, disasters
narrowly avoided, and disasters that actually occurred and were then kept secret.
To begin with, the greatest catastrophe among those announced and never happened is that
of "the absence of gravity that would have proved fatal for the human organism".
"Certain doctors of the time", says astronaut Gordon Cooper (1927-2004), "weren't even sure
if it was possible to sleep in space.
Furthermore, they did not know if a man, having woken up, would be able to fully regain his
senses ”. In 1958, the National Research Council Committee
on Bioastronautics made all sorts of apocalyptic predictions, even contradictory ones: in space,
astronauts would fall victim to euphoria or depression, their hearts would go crazy or
stop, they would not be able to urinate, they would stop.
to breathe, they would be suffocated by carbon dioxide or fried by cosmic rays, etc.
"The reaction to weightlessness will be terrifying," wrote the German physicist Heinz Haber (1913-1990).
"The astronaut will feel the sensation of falling into a bottomless pit and will desperately
look for a foothold.
We cannot exclude that something similar to seasickness will quickly render all crew members
incapacitated ". Other doctors thought that a man would not
be able to swallow: astronaut Walter Schirra (1923-2007) said that to disprove them, a
NASA technician started drinking a martini upside down.
Much harder to do than in zero gravity ...
If we want to give credit to the Russian sources that have had access to the archives made
public (or almost) in recent years, the blacklist of incidents that actually occurred at the
beginning of the Soviet space age appears much richer in episodes; all promptly hidden
by the regime's censorship.
And maybe it was better that way.
It is very likely that if the Russians had decided to abandon their space program following
these incidents, astronautics would never have even developed.
The United States, in fact, would have had no motivation, neither political nor economic,
in continuing a race which had already been won by abandoning the opponent.
Paradoxically, in this case the reluctance of the Soviet regime to admit its mistakes
proved to be fortunate for everyone.
However, in April 1965 even the prestigious (once!)
Reader's Digest dealt with the rumors that filtered through the Iron Curtain.
"There is a sinister possibility," wrote the famous science journalist John Ratcliff (1903-1973),
"that some long-dead Russian cosmonauts are still silently orbiting in space at thousands
of miles per hour ... victims of Soviet missile launches gone bad.
With bodies perfectly preserved from frost, they could wander alone in the cosmos for
centuries to come ”. After all, the rumors had been going around
for a long time.
In 1959, the famous German physicist Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), a pioneer in rocketry,
revealed that in 1958 a cosmonaut launched in a suborbital flight from the Kapustin Jar
Cosmodrome had died, but did not want to report the source.
In December of the same year, the Italian agency Continentale gave the news that, according
to a senior exponent of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, three Soviet cosmonauts had
so far been dead in as many suborbital flights.
The rumors were also fueled by photographs of men in spacesuits published in 1959 by
the Soviet weekly Ogonëk; the names of these men appeared in the captions, but it later
turned out that they, Belokonov, Kačur, Gračov, Mikhailov and Zavadovsky, had never taken
part in space flights, therefore proponents of the theory of lost cosmonauts believed
that they had died in the course of secret space missions.
On May 15, 1960, while in the Soviet Union, the writer Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was
informed by a cadet of the Red Army that on the same day the Soviets had launched a cosmonaut
in an orbital flight, but that a malfunctioning of the rear rockets had caused the loss of
the capsule upon its return to Earth.
On April 10, 1961, two days before Gagarin's flight, journalist Dennis Ogden, a correspondent
for the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, wrote that a few days earlier, exactly
on April 7, 1961, the Soviets had launched a man into space; at the news a French correspondent
in Moscow, Eduard Brobovski, the next day mentioned the name of Vladimir Ilyushin.
According to some sources, the alleged widow of Anatolij Tokov, one of the mysteriously
disappeared cosmonauts, during a visit to the United States with a Soviet delegation
to which he was a part, revealed that her husband died in 1967 during training during
a flight.
space.
Other sources report instead that Tokov would have been the husband of the alleged cosmonaut
Ludmilla Serakovna and that the couple flew into space together in 1961, losing their
life.
In 1999 a documentary was produced on the affair, in which it was told that Il'jušin,
launched before Gagarin, made an emergency landing in the territory of the People's Republic
of China and was seriously injured.
The theory of the lost cosmonauts was also fueled by some radio interceptions picked
up in the skies of Turin by two Italian radio amateurs: Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica
Cordiglia.
While probing the sky with radio equipment, the two Italians repeatedly intercepted alleged
signals and requests for help from cosmonauts in orbit.
There was furious controversy over their story and for several years the opposing factions
of those who believed in their wiretapping and those who claimed they were banal terrestrial
interference clashed.
In 2007, the History Channel made and aired Pirates of Space, a documentary that deals
in depth with the issue, and which claims that what the two brothers from Turin recorded
is irrefutable proof that the Soviet Union had lost in orbit before Gagarin.
a series of cosmonauts who have never been able to return to Earth.
Another witness deemed "more or less" reliable, Fidel Castro (yes, that Castro!), Who in 1980
was in Russia to attend the launch of the first Cuban cosmonaut, Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendez,
said he had seen the very secret "room of the martyrs ”with the relics of all the
perished cosmonauts, many more than officially admitted.
Moved, he added: "There are many heroes who sacrificed their lives at the beginning of
the space age!"
On the "Day of the Cosmonaut", April 12, 2001, the very unsuspected Pravda published disconcerting
news: Gagarin was not the first man in space.
“Three Soviet pilots died in previous attempts, says Mikhail Rudenko, chief engineer of the
456 Experimental Projects Office.
According to Rudenko, three capsules with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at
the controls were launched in suborbital flights from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome in 1957,
1958 and 1959.
All three died during the flight, and their names were never officially disclosed, says
Rudenko ”. And this turned out to be a confirmation of what Hermann Oberth had revealed a few
years earlier.
The existence of a secret space program could explain the reason for the mystery surrounding
these deaths, and also why, despite the losses, the Russians continued with their "official"
program, in which they paid homage to the missing cosmonauts, complete with funerals
of State.
In the 1988 book Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost, NASA engineer
and historian James Oberg reports that the first official victim, although only recognized
in 1986, was Valentin Bondarenko.
On March 23, 1961, three weeks before Gagarin's flight, Bondarenko died horribly tortured
after a fire in an oxygen-filled pressurized chamber used for training.
He burned alive for several minutes, and eventually died after sixteen hours of agony, stuffed
with painkillers.
On November 1, 1962, Piotr Dolgov died while trying to jump with a parachute from 28,000
meters (the first Soviet cosmonauts, including Gagarin, were all trained to jump from the
capsule before landing).
In fact, the same agency Tass reported in 1967 the deaths in previous years of as many
as 11 cosmonauts ... but all during parachute drills from great heights.
"The only solution was to let the oxygen out slowly, while I was trying to push myself
inside a few centimeters at a time.
I could feel my temperature rise dangerously, and a flow of heat rising from my feet to
my legs and arms, due to the immense physical effort of that maneuver.
Everything turned out to be much slower than I assumed.
Even when I finally managed to stuff everything into the airlock, I had to perform another
almost impossible feat, writhing to reach the outer compartment door and close it.
After 23 minutes, I came back soaked in sweat and my heart went crazy ”.
“From the moment that Leonov's mission seemed at risk, all transmissions from the spacecraft,
broadcast by radio and TV, were abruptly suspended.
In their place, state radio repeatedly broadcast Mozart's Requiem.
At that time it was customary in the Soviet Union to play solemn music after the death
of an eminent figure, but before the official announcement was made ". The return to Earth
was in a wolf-infested forest, where the two lit a fire to warm themselves.
Precisely because no one knew what they would find on their return, all Soviet cosmonauts
were armed with guns.
“On April 24, 1967,” Oberg continues in Uncovering Soviet Disasters, “cosmonaut
Vladimir Komarov was killed when the parachute from his Soyuz 1 capsule twisted on its way
back to Earth.
Years later Victor Yevsikov, an engineer who had collaborated in designing the capsule's
heat shield, emigrated to America and wrote his memoirs.
He said: 'The technicians knew that the vehicle was not yet fully developed, but the Party
ordered the launch despite four preliminary attempts having failed.
Serious problems hit the ship almost immediately, and at one point Komarov, furious, exclaimed:
'Damn machine, there isn't a single command that works!'
" “Komarov's death sparked a flurry of rumors,
and the most gruesome is that his screams of agony were recorded by American monitoring
stations.
According to this account, he knew he was already doomed while still in orbit and had
heartbreaking talks with his wife, Prime Minister Aleksey Kosygin, and his fellow astronauts.
When the deadly plunge towards Earth began, he signaled the temperature rising, then he
started screaming ”. But what was Komarov doing in orbit?
On April 22, the UPI news agency reported that within 48 hours the Russians would attempt
"their greatest feat: the coupling between two spacecraft during the flight and the passage
of men from one to the other".
According to astronaut Buzz Aldrin's book Men from Earth, the reason for the Soviets'
haste is that the flight absolutely had to be completed by May Day.
A second capsule was already ready for launch with three men, two of whom were to make the
spacewalk, and the countdown had even begun.
But things got so bad that Komarov could not even maintain continuous radio contact, or
maintain flight attitude.
After running out of fuel, and also running out of electricity, he attempted an emergency
landing.
Virtually nothing remained of him, just a shapeless lump.
Over ten thousand people went on pilgrimage to the site of the disaster.
"Komarov may have had a premonition of his fate," Time wrote.
"Just before the cosmonaut entered the spacecraft, he handed a colleague the book he was reading
... a biography of Joan of Arc.
In the part describing the Maid of Orleans burning at the stake, Komarov had underlined
the following passage: "He said his goodbyes and continued to stare at the clear blue sky
until the last second, when the black smoke darkened that sky forever".