Posted on 04/12/2016 11:02:11 AM PDT by EveningStar
Please click the link to view the slideshow. There are 40 images, minus a few ads.
(Excerpt) Read more at cleveland.com ...
Flying is dangerous enough as it is, so a plane crash is not in and of itself suspicious.
...
We also lost some astronauts to plane crashes, but I think they were all before they went on any missions. Flying wasn’t as safe back then as it is now.
In grade school, one kid's father worked at a nearby NASA facility, who showed up one day for a presentation in the cafeteria to our grade. I remember him tossing a cup of LOX on a drape. Little did anybody know the dangers at the time, too distracted by the oohs and ahhs of PDQ vaporization.
He also brought along Glen's pressure suit from the Mercury flight.
When I was in the USN even back in the Seventies, I was amazed at the number of crashes and mishaps.
Probably a good thing there was no Internet to speak of then. Otherwise all military planes might have been grounded by appalled civilians. As it was, unless you lived in the aviation community near the homebase of the crashed plane, or the plane crashed in a spectacular way with loss of life, people around the country never seemed to hear about it.
I know I didn’t.
That must have been GREAT being a grade school kid and seeing Glenn’s pressure suit!
I had to be happy with the GI Joe with that silver astronaut suit that flaked all the silver off!
Lost in Space (What really happened to Russia’s missing cosmonauts?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2048540/posts
The guy who burned up knew that Gagarin — already a Red hero — would be sent up if he refused the mission. His last words broadcast from his doomed machine were condemnations of the jackasses who’d insisted it go forward.
I remember listening to the recording of the incinerated one upon re-entry years ago.
The Safety Officer’s gonna have my ass!
We had a family friend, Sonny Carter, who was killed in a plane crash. He flew on STS-33 and was scheduled to fly on STS-42 when he died.
LOL, I had to go watch it again, been a few years.
This film would so offend the snowflakes nowadays. How sexist!
What the snowflakes don’t know is that the film was targeted at 18 year old boys/men.
They watched, and grinned...and learned. And every man I ever knew who watched it remembered the lessons, and never fooled around with LOX.
That is an impressive training feat.
I read that somewhere. I don’t know how true it all is.
But it all sounds entirely plausible to me. If one reads “The Gulag Archipelago”, the evil, and often mundane treachery that was inherent to communist societies (but particularly in the Soviet and East German societies) shows how callously they could set things up without a scruple.
So is it possible the whole story is true-with Gagarin turning into a ticking political time-bomb when he would get absolutely pie-faced around dignitaries and such, where there might be western reporters who couldn’t be strong-armed the same way...and they just made the decision to do away with him.
One can see this scenario (this is how I see it played out somewhere and it includes elements from the NPR account...it is fiction, but...since nobody knows that it is any more than a straightforward fatal plane crash, it is all just speculation. But it fits, I think):
*********************************************
It is a state reception of some kind. Nikita Khrushchev is there, perhaps some western reporters and some political figures or functionaries as well, as Yuri Gagarin. Yuri had been drinking heavily for months, and it probably wasn’t hard to do. He was beloved and famous, and never had to buy a drink. And everyone knows how Russians can put away vodka, so he was drinking a lot.
And he was angry.
His good friend had been killed in a horribly botched, compromised spacecraft, and Gagarin not only knew full well how dangerous the Soyuz 1 was, he had written a ten page letter to Khrushchev that was poison to any bureaucrat who laid eyes on it. Khrushchev never actually read it, but word had made it back to Khrushchev who nearly had a stroke when he heard the gist of it.
Now, at this function, Gagarin was with a bunch of diplomats from a variety of African countries, and he had been drinking quite heavily. The diplomats were warily watching Gagarin as he gestured angrily towards Khrushchev and his group, his voice rising in anger.
The group of Soviets watched nervously, and Khrushchev glared at Gagarin who was acting as if Khrushchev wasn’t even there.
Khrushchev turned to the general next to him and hissed “That’s it. Get rid of him. Make him disappear. I don’t care how, just do it.”
*********************************************
See, that doesn’t sound far fetched at all, to me. But it is fiction.
Thanks, it’s not implausible, even though it’s fiction.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.