Posted on 01/27/2008 4:19:04 AM PST by jalisco555
As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin's famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday. According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959. "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published," Rudenko said. He explained that all these pilots took part in so-called sub- orbital flights, i.e., their goal was not to orbit around the earth, which Gagarin later did, but make a parabola-shaped flight. "The cosmonauts were to reach space heights in the highest point of such an orbit and then return to the Earth," Rudenko said. According to his information, Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov were regular test pilots, who had not had any special training, Interfax reports. "Obviously, after such a serious of tragic launches, the project managers decided to cardinally change the program and approach the training of cosmonauts much more seriously in order to create a cosmonaut detachment," Rudenko said.
i remember when i was a kid many stories about failed Soviet missions in space... “Argosy” magazine and similar had sensational articles about them as i recall.
They couldn’t find any chimps?
Actually they started with a dog, who also died.
So after the THIRD spacecraft crashes or blows up, they decide to actually train their “pilots” to be cosmonaut!
They didn’t need to. The Soviets never valued individual human life, unless it was a ranking party member.
Makes you wonder what Yuri Gagarin was thinking as they strapped him in.
Suborbital manned flights BEFORE the launching of the tiny Sputnik 1 seems a little unlikely!
Imagine if Alan Shepard’s first flight had ended in disaster. Would he have gone down the memory hole? Highly doubtful.
Now we've gotta go back and change everything.
The history books, Trivial Pursuit...
Freakin' commies.
Gagarin was a brave man, there's no denying that.
It does an injustice to Laika to say that she simply “died.” She was left in space with no means to return her home, to starve or suffocate to death, by the cold-blooded communists.
Maybe right after. Might have been aiming for a double propaganda coup.
True enough. It was an act of extreme cruelty to kill a dog that way just to make a propaganda point.
What happened? Why the discredit? Did his kids move to Queens?
LOL. Maybe someone just wanted to correct an historical injustice. Doesn't take anything away from Gagarin though.
Laika died five to seven hours after launch of overheating due to inadequate temperature control systems.
The scientists had planned to kill her with a serving of poison food after several days, but she died accidentally before they could do so.
Her death was no more cruel than that of dogs and other animals routinely used in the US for animal experiments, and it was a great deal more productive scientifically than tests of new skin cream.
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