Soviet space program conspiracy accusations
Encyclopedia
Lost Cosmonauts, or Phantom Cosmonauts, is a conspiracy theory
alleging that cosmonauts entered outer space
, but without their existence having been acknowledged by either the Soviet
or Russia
n space authorities.
Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory concede that Yuri Gagarin
was the first man to survive space travel
, but claim that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights prior to Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin
, is believed to have landed off-course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union
supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War
.
The evidence cited to support Lost Cosmonaut theories is generally not regarded as conclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. In the 1980s, American journalist James Oberg
researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, but found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information is now available. Even with the availability of published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged to support the Lost Cosmonaut stories.
Also in 1959, pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth
claimed that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital
ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar
in early 1958. He provided no source for the story. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale repeated the claims that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital manned flights ever came to light.
wrote in his article Pravda means 'Truth (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in Vilnius
, in the Soviet Union, 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. Apparently, no issues of Pravda
could be found in Vilnius or, reportedly, other Soviet cities for that date. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch, later said to be unmanned, on that day, but that the retro-rockets had fired at the wrong altitude, making recovery efforts unsuccessful.
According to Gagarin's biography these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions, equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich
) and human voice tape recordings, to check if the radio worked, that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight.
In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, Col. Barney Oldfield revealed that a space cabin had indeed been orbiting the earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA
NSSDC Master Catalog
, Korabl Sputnik 1
, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit
and Vostok
manned launcher
s. The onboard TDU had ordered the retrorocket
s to fire, but due to a malfunction, the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heatshield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel's telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.
Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur and Alexey Grachov, testing high-altitude equipment. Official records state that Dolgov was killed on November 1, 1962, while carrying out a high-altitude parachute
jump from a Volga balloon gondola. Dolgov jumped at an altitude of 28,640 meters (93,970 feet). The helmet visor of Dolgov's Sokol pressure suit
hit part of the gondola as he exited, de-pressurizing the suit and killing him. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment. Grachov is thought to have been involved, with Dolgov and Kachur, in testing the high-altitude equipment. As with the others, it can be presumed that his work on high-altitude testing was exaggerated into a story that he died on a space flight. In late 1959, Ogoniok carried pictures of a man identified as Comrade
Gennady Zavadovsky testing high-altitude equipment (perhaps with Grachov and others). Zavadovsky would later appear on lists of dead cosmonauts, without a date of death or accident description .
According to the official records, there were no launches from any Soviet launch sites that could have corresponded to this event. The two closest events were suborbital test launches of the R-16 ICBM on the 16th and the 24th.
Another recording from Torre Bert purports to be the sounds of labored breathing and a failing heartbeat. This combined with reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7
was a manned mission, gave rise to claims that a cosmonaut named Gennady Mikhailov was the first man in orbit and died there due to heart failure. According to the TASS news agency it was a failed Venus probe. These recordings are also of highly doubtful veracity, as data on heart rate and breathing patterns were not transmitted via audio on Vostok spacecraft, but via telemetric data.
The third Torre Bert recording claims to have heard a couple launched on February 17, 1961, aboard a Lunik
spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth" at regular intervals.
On February 24, 1961, there were some garbled verbal transmissions about something the couple could see outside their ship, that they urgently had to communicate to Earth. What happened is unclear, but communication was lost. Around the same time the listening station at Torre Bert reportedly picked up an SOS signal from a craft in space. As the signal got weaker, it was assumed whatever craft it was disappeared into deep space. This is also unlikely to be true, as the amount of thrust required to break Earth's gravitational field entirely was beyond the capabilities of early Soviet spacecraft .
Alexey Belokonev is reportedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November 1962 flight. The Torre Bert tower in Italy allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages relayed by the three occupants. 'Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us. . . .'
, son of Soviet airplane designer Sergey Ilyushin, was a Soviet pilot and is purported to have been a cosmonaut, alleged by some to have actually been the first man in space on April 7, 1961—an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.
The theories surrounding this alleged orbital
flight are that a failure aboard the spacecraft
caused controllers to bring the descending capsule down several orbits earlier than intended, resulting in its landing in the People's Republic of China
. The pilot was then held by Chinese authorities for a year before being returned to the Soviet Union. The international embarrassment that would have resulted from such an incident is cited as the Soviets' reason for not publicizing this flight—they reportedly focused their publicizing efforts on the subsequent successful flight of Yuri Gagarin instead.
However, there are reasons to disbelieve this allegation. Although both were Communist government
s, relations between the Soviet Union and China were strained
. The propaganda
value of a Soviet pilot captured flying over Chinese territory would have given little reason for Chinese authorities to cooperate in a cover-up. Also, "bringing the capsule down several orbits earlier than intended" does not make sense, considering that the Vostok mission
involved a single orbit.
This theory originated on April 10, 1961, with Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and was actually based on Ilyushin's medical treatment and care in China. According to many Soviet sources, and to the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda
dated July 11, 2005, Ilyushin was a famous test pilot but he was never involved in the space program. On June 5, 1960, his legs were seriously injured in a car accident. Ilyushin underwent medical treatment for a year in Moscow, then was sent to Hangzhou
, China, for rehabilitation under specialists in Traditional Chinese medicine
. This explanation was also confirmed by the 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
(Russian translation of the book).
The theory gained some credibility in 1999 due to a documentary on the subject titled The Cosmonaut Cover-up. Interviewed in English, Sergei Khrushchev
, son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
, said that it was true and that Vladimir Ilyushin was actually held in China for over a year as a "guest" of the People's Republic of China. He was later returned to the Soviet Union, but by then the Gagarin legend was in place and the bizarre incident was covered up. The main reason for concealment was to not let the West see the schism between China and the USSR.
Vladimir Ilyushin never confirmed this theory, dying in 2010.
flight to the moon, the Soviets undertook an adventurous attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet N1 rocket
on January 20, 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a manned Soyuz 7K-L3
craft to the moon using an N1. This attempt is alleged to have occurred on July 3, 1969, when it ended in explosion destroying the launch pad and killing cosmonauts on board. Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for manned missions. Its moon-landing module, the LK, had been tested a few times but its orbiter, the 7K-LOK, had not been successfully tested by the closing of the moon-landing program at the end of 1974. The closing of the program was officially denied and maintained top secret until 1989.
This claim correlates with the late hoax about unsuccessful moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan.
However, in reality, the second launch, like the first, was a test of the booster and was therefore unmanned. Even if cosmonauts had been on board, they would have been rescued by its launch escape system
, which carried the dummy payload to safety 2km from the pad. One mission in the Soyuz program, Soyuz T-10-1
, did see the spacecraft and cosmonauts rescued safely from a failed booster rocket by its launch escape system; it is the only documented case of such a system in use with a manned spacecraft.
There are also rumors that Soviet automatic sample-return craft, Luna, and remote-controlled automatic moon rover, Lunokhods, were, due to failures in automation, manned by cosmonauts who had agreed to take part in suicide missions. However, there is not enough space in either the Luna or Lunokhod for even one cosmonaut, even excluding life support system space. There had been a plan to develop modified Lunokhods with additional controls for use as a transport in manned moon-landing missions but this plan ended with the moon-landing program.
Among the Lunas, a June 14, 1969, failed to launch, a July 13, 1969, test, Luna 15
launched but failed to land on the moon. Among the rovers, there was a failed launch on February 19, 1969, and two successful launches on November 10, 1970, and January 8, 1973.
was an unmanned spacecraft that was the docking target for Soyuz 3
. However, Mike Arena, an American journalist, found in 1993 that Ivan Istochnikov and his dog Kloka were manning Soyuz 2, and disappeared on October 26, 1968, with signs of having been hit by a meteorite. They had been "erased" from history by the Soviet authorities, who could not tolerate such a failure.
The entire story was found to be a hoax perpetrated by Joan Fontcuberta
, as a 'modern art exercise' that included falsified mission artifacts
, various digitally manipulated images, and immensely detailed feature-length biographies that turned out to be riddled with hundreds of historical as well as technical errors. The exhibit was shown in Madrid in 1997 and the National Museum of Catalan Art in 1998. Brown University
later purchased several articles, and put them on display themselves.
Mexico's Luna Cornea magazine however, failed to notice this, and ran issue number 14 (January/April 1998) with photos, and a story explaining the tragic and as-yet-untold truth.
The name Ivan Istochnikov is a Russian translation of Joan Fontcuberta's name; translated to English from Russian reads "John of the Source".
On June 11, 2006, Cuarto Milenio, a mysteries program led by Iker Jiménez
on the Spanish TV channel Cuatro, presented the story as possibly true.
Japanese singer Akino Arai
wrote a song about Istochnikov and Kloka, titled "Sputnik" on her Furu Platinum
album.
and Vitali Sevastyanov
and a control center. The conversations appeared to originate from a Soviet Zond 6
spacecraft that was launched on November 10, 1968, and successfully flew for 7 days around the Moon. This was at a time of intense competition during the moon flyby phase of the Moon race between the USSR and the U.S. The Soviet L1/Zond spacecraft was almost ready for manned missions, although testing was not yet complete, and it was not unimaginable that the USSR might undertake a manned flyby using the L1/Zond spacecraft in order to beat the Americans.
It was soon clear, however, that these were test transmissions between two ground control centers with the
Zond 6 intercepting and relaying the transmissions.
After the successful U.S. Apollo 8
manned flight around the Moon, the Soviet manned flyby missions lost political urgency. The first manned flight of L1/Zond spacecraft with Alexey Leonov and Valery Bykovsky planned for the end of 1968 was canceled and Zond spacecraft made only a few unmanned, automatic flights after that.
This story undoubtedly influenced the plot of an episode of the television series The Cape. The episode "Buried in Peace" first aired on October 28, 1996. In it, a shuttle crew on a mission to repair a communications satellite encounters a derelict Soviet spacecraft with a dead crew—the result of a secret attempt to send a manned mission to the moon 30 years earlier, before the United States. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan in the story.
This story correlates with another claim about the unsuccessful second manned test flight of the N1 rocket.
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
alleging that cosmonauts entered outer space
Outer space
Outer space is the void that exists between celestial bodies, including the Earth. It is not completely empty, but consists of a hard vacuum containing a low density of particles: predominantly a plasma of hydrogen and helium, as well as electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, and neutrinos....
, but without their existence having been acknowledged by either the Soviet
Soviet people
Soviet people or Soviet nation was an umbrella demonym for the population of the Soviet Union. Initially used as a nonspecific reference to the Soviet population, it was eventually declared to be a "new historical, social and international unity of people".-Nationality politics in early Soviet...
or Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n space authorities.
Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory concede that Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961....
was the first man to survive space travel
Human spaceflight
Human spaceflight is spaceflight with humans on the spacecraft. When a spacecraft is manned, it can be piloted directly, as opposed to machine or robotic space probes and remotely-controlled satellites....
, but claim that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights prior to Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin
Vladimir Ilyushin
Major General Vladimir Sergeyevich Ilyushin was a Soviet general and noted test pilot, and the son of aerospace engineer Sergei Ilyushin. He spent most of his career as a test pilot for the Sukhoi OKB...
, is believed to have landed off-course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union
Government of the Soviet Union
The Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was the de jure government comprising the highest executive and administrative body of the Soviet Union from 1946 until 1991....
supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
.
The evidence cited to support Lost Cosmonaut theories is generally not regarded as conclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. In the 1980s, American journalist James Oberg
James Oberg
James Edward Oberg is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.-Biography:...
researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, but found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information is now available. Even with the availability of published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged to support the Lost Cosmonaut stories.
Purported Czech information leak
In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Aleksei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted R-5A rocket, two more names of alleged cosmonauts claimed to have perished under similar circumstances were Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Marya Gromova.Also in 1959, pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth
Hermann Oberth
Hermann Julius Oberth was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.- Early life :...
claimed that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital
Sub-orbital spaceflight
A sub-orbital space flight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches space, but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched, so that it does not complete one orbital revolution....
ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar
Kapustin Yar
Kapustin Yar is a Russian rocket launch and development site in Astrakhan Oblast, between Volgograd and Astrakhan. Known today as Znamensk , it was established 13 May 1946 and in the beginning used technology, material, and scientific support from defeated Germany...
in early 1958. He provided no source for the story. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale repeated the claims that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital manned flights ever came to light.
Heinlein
In 1960, Robert A. HeinleinRobert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
wrote in his article Pravda means 'Truth (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in Vilnius
Vilnius
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...
, in the Soviet Union, 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. Apparently, no issues of Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
could be found in Vilnius or, reportedly, other Soviet cities for that date. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch, later said to be unmanned, on that day, but that the retro-rockets had fired at the wrong altitude, making recovery efforts unsuccessful.
According to Gagarin's biography these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions, equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich
Ivan Ivanovich
Ivan Ivanovich, the Russian equivalent for 'John Doe' was the name given to a mannequin used in testing the Russian Vostok spacecraft in preparation for its manned missions....
) and human voice tape recordings, to check if the radio worked, that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight.
In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, Col. Barney Oldfield revealed that a space cabin had indeed been orbiting the earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
NSSDC Master Catalog
International Designator
The International Designator, also known as COSPAR designation, and in the United States as NSSDC ID, is an international naming convention for satellites...
, Korabl Sputnik 1
Sputnik 4
Korabl-Sputnik 1 , was the first test flight of the Soviet Vostok programme, and the first Vostok spacecraft. It was launched on May 15, 1960. Though Korabl-Sputnik 1 was unmanned, it was a precursor to the first human spaceflight, Vostok 1...
, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit
Zenit
-People:* Zenit Đozić, a Bosnian actor, humorist and television producer.* Zenit , a Spanish MC.* Jose Roberto Zenit Camacho, a prominent researcher at the materials research institute , rheologist, Baltasar Mena Iniesta student....
and Vostok
Vostok
Vostok may refer to one of the following.Spaceflight*The Soviet Vostok programme of human spaceflight.*The Vostok spacecraft used in that programme and also the basis of a reconnaissance satellite.*The Vostok rocket, used to launch the Vostok spacecraft....
manned launcher
Human spaceflight
Human spaceflight is spaceflight with humans on the spacecraft. When a spacecraft is manned, it can be piloted directly, as opposed to machine or robotic space probes and remotely-controlled satellites....
s. The onboard TDU had ordered the retrorocket
Retrorocket
A retrorocket is a rocket engine providing thrust opposing the motion of a spacecraft, thereby causing it to decelerate.-History:...
s to fire, but due to a malfunction, the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heatshield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel's telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.
High-altitude equipment tests
A 1959 edition of Ogoniok carried images of three men, ColonelColonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur and Alexey Grachov, testing high-altitude equipment. Official records state that Dolgov was killed on November 1, 1962, while carrying out a high-altitude parachute
Parachute
A parachute is a device used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag, or in the case of ram-air parachutes, aerodynamic lift. Parachutes are usually made out of light, strong cloth, originally silk, now most commonly nylon...
jump from a Volga balloon gondola. Dolgov jumped at an altitude of 28,640 meters (93,970 feet). The helmet visor of Dolgov's Sokol pressure suit
Sokol space suit
The Sokol space suit is a type of Russian space suit, worn by all who fly on the Soyuz spacecraft. It was introduced in 1973 and is still used . The Sokol is described by its makers as a rescue suit, and it is not capable of being used outside the spacecraft in a spacewalk or extra-vehicular...
hit part of the gondola as he exited, de-pressurizing the suit and killing him. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment. Grachov is thought to have been involved, with Dolgov and Kachur, in testing the high-altitude equipment. As with the others, it can be presumed that his work on high-altitude testing was exaggerated into a story that he died on a space flight. In late 1959, Ogoniok carried pictures of a man identified as Comrade
Comrade
Comrade means "friend", "colleague", or "ally". The word comes from French camarade. The term is frequently used by left-wing organizations around the globe. "Comrade" has often become a stock phrase and form of address. This word has its regional equivalents available in many...
Gennady Zavadovsky testing high-altitude equipment (perhaps with Grachov and others). Zavadovsky would later appear on lists of dead cosmonauts, without a date of death or accident description .
The Torre Bert Recordings
On May 19, 1961, the Torre Bert listening station in northern Italy purportedly picked up a transmission of a woman's voice, sounding confused and frightened as her craft began to break up upon reentry. The veracity of the recording, however, is highly doubtful, as the woman speaks poor Russian with a marked foreign accent and does not adhere to any standard Soviet space program communication protocols . Additionally, it is simply impossible that a transmission could be heard of the re-entry stage of a flight, as there is a communications blackout when a vehicle enters Earth's atmosphere.According to the official records, there were no launches from any Soviet launch sites that could have corresponded to this event. The two closest events were suborbital test launches of the R-16 ICBM on the 16th and the 24th.
Another recording from Torre Bert purports to be the sounds of labored breathing and a failing heartbeat. This combined with reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7
Sputnik 7
Tyazhely Sputnik, , also known as Venera 1VA No.1, and in the West as Sputnik 7, was a Soviet spacecraft, which was intended to be the first spacecraft to explore Venus. Due to a problem with its upper stage it failed to leave low Earth orbit...
was a manned mission, gave rise to claims that a cosmonaut named Gennady Mikhailov was the first man in orbit and died there due to heart failure. According to the TASS news agency it was a failed Venus probe. These recordings are also of highly doubtful veracity, as data on heart rate and breathing patterns were not transmitted via audio on Vostok spacecraft, but via telemetric data.
The third Torre Bert recording claims to have heard a couple launched on February 17, 1961, aboard a Lunik
Luna programme
The Luna programme , occasionally called Lunik or Lunnik, was a series of robotic spacecraft missions sent to the Moon by the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1976. Fifteen were successful, each designed as either an orbiter or lander, and accomplished many firsts in space exploration...
spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth" at regular intervals.
On February 24, 1961, there were some garbled verbal transmissions about something the couple could see outside their ship, that they urgently had to communicate to Earth. What happened is unclear, but communication was lost. Around the same time the listening station at Torre Bert reportedly picked up an SOS signal from a craft in space. As the signal got weaker, it was assumed whatever craft it was disappeared into deep space. This is also unlikely to be true, as the amount of thrust required to break Earth's gravitational field entirely was beyond the capabilities of early Soviet spacecraft .
Alexey Belokonev is reportedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November 1962 flight. The Torre Bert tower in Italy allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages relayed by the three occupants. 'Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us. . . .'
Vladimir Ilyushin
Vladimir IlyushinVladimir Ilyushin
Major General Vladimir Sergeyevich Ilyushin was a Soviet general and noted test pilot, and the son of aerospace engineer Sergei Ilyushin. He spent most of his career as a test pilot for the Sukhoi OKB...
, son of Soviet airplane designer Sergey Ilyushin, was a Soviet pilot and is purported to have been a cosmonaut, alleged by some to have actually been the first man in space on April 7, 1961—an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.
The theories surrounding this alleged orbital
Orbital spaceflight
An orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit. To do this around the Earth, it must be on a free trajectory which has an altitude at perigee above...
flight are that a failure aboard the spacecraft
Spacecraft
A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....
caused controllers to bring the descending capsule down several orbits earlier than intended, resulting in its landing in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. The pilot was then held by Chinese authorities for a year before being returned to the Soviet Union. The international embarrassment that would have resulted from such an incident is cited as the Soviets' reason for not publicizing this flight—they reportedly focused their publicizing efforts on the subsequent successful flight of Yuri Gagarin instead.
However, there are reasons to disbelieve this allegation. Although both were Communist government
Communist government
A communist government can refer to:* The government of a one-party communist state* The communist government of a multi-party state...
s, relations between the Soviet Union and China were strained
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
. The propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
value of a Soviet pilot captured flying over Chinese territory would have given little reason for Chinese authorities to cooperate in a cover-up. Also, "bringing the capsule down several orbits earlier than intended" does not make sense, considering that the Vostok mission
Vostok 1
Vostok 1 was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961. The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space. The flight marked the first time that a human entered outer...
involved a single orbit.
This theory originated on April 10, 1961, with Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and was actually based on Ilyushin's medical treatment and care in China. According to many Soviet sources, and to the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda
Komsomolskaya Pravda
Komsomolskaya Pravda is a daily Russian tabloid newspaper, founded on March 13th, 1925. It is published by "Izdatelsky Dom Komsomolskaya Pravda" .- History :...
dated July 11, 2005, Ilyushin was a famous test pilot but he was never involved in the space program. On June 5, 1960, his legs were seriously injured in a car accident. Ilyushin underwent medical treatment for a year in Moscow, then was sent to Hangzhou
Hangzhou
Hangzhou , formerly transliterated as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. Governed as a sub-provincial city, and as of 2010, its entire administrative division or prefecture had a registered population of 8.7 million people...
, China, for rehabilitation under specialists in Traditional Chinese medicine
Traditional Chinese medicine
Traditional Chinese Medicine refers to a broad range of medicine practices sharing common theoretical concepts which have been developed in China and are based on a tradition of more than 2,000 years, including various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage , exercise , and dietary therapy...
. This explanation was also confirmed by the 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
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
(Russian translation of the book).
The theory gained some credibility in 1999 due to a documentary on the subject titled The Cosmonaut Cover-up. Interviewed in English, Sergei Khrushchev
Sergei Khrushchev
Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev , son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, now resides in the United States where he is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.-Career:...
, son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
, said that it was true and that Vladimir Ilyushin was actually held in China for over a year as a "guest" of the People's Republic of China. He was later returned to the Soviet Union, but by then the Gagarin legend was in place and the bizarre incident was covered up. The main reason for concealment was to not let the West see the schism between China and the USSR.
Vladimir Ilyushin never confirmed this theory, dying in 2010.
Moon-shot allegations
The Soviet Union lost the manned moon-landing phase of the Moon race to the United States. However, some sources claim that just before the historic Apollo 11Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
flight to the moon, the Soviets undertook an adventurous attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet N1 rocket
N1 rocket
N-1 was a heavy lift rocket intended to deliver payloads beyond low Earth orbit, acting as the Soviet counterpart to the NASA Saturn V rocket. This heavy lift booster had the capability of lifting very heavy loads into orbit, designed with manned extra-orbital travel in mind...
on January 20, 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a manned Soyuz 7K-L3
Soyuz 7K-L3
The Soyuz 7K-LOK, or simply LOK was a Soviet spacecraft designed to launch men from Earth to circle the moon and developed in parallel to the 7K-L1. The LOK would carry two cosmonauts into orbit around the Moon, acting as "mother" spacecraft for the LK Lander, which would land one member of the...
craft to the moon using an N1. This attempt is alleged to have occurred on July 3, 1969, when it ended in explosion destroying the launch pad and killing cosmonauts on board. Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for manned missions. Its moon-landing module, the LK, had been tested a few times but its orbiter, the 7K-LOK, had not been successfully tested by the closing of the moon-landing program at the end of 1974. The closing of the program was officially denied and maintained top secret until 1989.
This claim correlates with the late hoax about unsuccessful moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan.
However, in reality, the second launch, like the first, was a test of the booster and was therefore unmanned. Even if cosmonauts had been on board, they would have been rescued by its launch escape system
Launch escape system
A Launch Escape System is a top-mounted rocket connected to the crew module of a crewed spacecraft and used to quickly separate the crew module from the rest of the rocket in case of emergency. Since the escape rockets are above the crew module, an LES typically uses separate nozzles which are...
, which carried the dummy payload to safety 2km from the pad. One mission in the Soyuz program, Soyuz T-10-1
Soyuz T-10-1
-Mission parameters:*Mass: 6850 kg*Perigee: N/A*Apogee: N/A*Inclination: N/A*Period: N/A-Mission highlights:...
, did see the spacecraft and cosmonauts rescued safely from a failed booster rocket by its launch escape system; it is the only documented case of such a system in use with a manned spacecraft.
There are also rumors that Soviet automatic sample-return craft, Luna, and remote-controlled automatic moon rover, Lunokhods, were, due to failures in automation, manned by cosmonauts who had agreed to take part in suicide missions. However, there is not enough space in either the Luna or Lunokhod for even one cosmonaut, even excluding life support system space. There had been a plan to develop modified Lunokhods with additional controls for use as a transport in manned moon-landing missions but this plan ended with the moon-landing program.
Among the Lunas, a June 14, 1969, failed to launch, a July 13, 1969, test, Luna 15
Luna 15
-External links:*...
launched but failed to land on the moon. Among the rovers, there was a failed launch on February 19, 1969, and two successful launches on November 10, 1970, and January 8, 1973.
Ivan Istochnikov
Officially Soyuz 2Soyuz 2
Soyuz 2 was an unpiloted spacecraft in the Soyuz family intended to perform a docking maneuver with Soyuz 3. Although the two craft approached closely, the docking did not take place.-Other uses of name:...
was an unmanned spacecraft that was the docking target for Soyuz 3
Soyuz 3
Soyuz 3 was a spaceflight mission launched by the Soviet Union on October 26, 1968. For four consecutive days, Commander Georgy Beregovoy piloted the Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft through eighty-one orbits of Earth.-Crew:-Backup crew:...
. However, Mike Arena, an American journalist, found in 1993 that Ivan Istochnikov and his dog Kloka were manning Soyuz 2, and disappeared on October 26, 1968, with signs of having been hit by a meteorite. They had been "erased" from history by the Soviet authorities, who could not tolerate such a failure.
The entire story was found to be a hoax perpetrated by Joan Fontcuberta
Joan Fontcuberta
Joan Fontcuberta is a conceptual artist whose best-known works, such as Fauna and Sputnik, examine the truthfulness of photography. In addition, he is a writer, editor, teacher, and curator....
, as a 'modern art exercise' that included falsified mission artifacts
False document
A false document is a literary technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction. By inventing and inserting documents that appear to be factual, an author tries to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art...
, various digitally manipulated images, and immensely detailed feature-length biographies that turned out to be riddled with hundreds of historical as well as technical errors. The exhibit was shown in Madrid in 1997 and the National Museum of Catalan Art in 1998. Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
later purchased several articles, and put them on display themselves.
Mexico's Luna Cornea magazine however, failed to notice this, and ran issue number 14 (January/April 1998) with photos, and a story explaining the tragic and as-yet-untold truth.
The name Ivan Istochnikov is a Russian translation of Joan Fontcuberta's name; translated to English from Russian reads "John of the Source".
On June 11, 2006, Cuarto Milenio, a mysteries program led by Iker Jiménez
Íker Jiménez
Iker Jiménez Elizari is a Spanish journalist.He was born in Vitoria, and has a bachelor's degree in journalism from both the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the European University....
on the Spanish TV channel Cuatro, presented the story as possibly true.
Japanese singer Akino Arai
Akino Arai
is a Japanese singer, song-writer, and lyricist, best known for her works in anime such as Outlaw Star, Noir, Macross Plus, and many others....
wrote a song about Istochnikov and Kloka, titled "Sputnik" on her Furu Platinum
Furu Platinum
Furu Purachina is Akino Arai's fourth official album release.-Track listing:#"スプートニク"#:#"願い事"#:#"ガレキの楽園"#:#"Flower"...
album.
Pavel Popovich and Vitali Sevastyanov
NASA radio monitoring service intercepted conversations between Pavel PopovichPavel Popovich
- Biography :He was born in Uzyn, Kiev Oblast of Soviet Union . to Roman Porfirievich Popovich and Theodosia Kasyanovna Semyonov. He had two sisters and two brothers ....
and Vitali Sevastyanov
Vitali Sevastyanov
Vitaly Ivanovich Sevastyanov was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 9 and Soyuz 18 missions.He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Aviation Institute and after graduation in 1959, joined Sergey Korolev's design bureau, where he worked on the design of the Vostok spacecraft. He also lectured...
and a control center. The conversations appeared to originate from a Soviet Zond 6
Zond 6
Zond 6, a formal member of the Soviet Zond program and unmanned version of Soyuz 7K-L1 manned moon-flyby spacecraft, was launched on a lunar flyby mission from a parent satellite in Earth parking orbit...
spacecraft that was launched on November 10, 1968, and successfully flew for 7 days around the Moon. This was at a time of intense competition during the moon flyby phase of the Moon race between the USSR and the U.S. The Soviet L1/Zond spacecraft was almost ready for manned missions, although testing was not yet complete, and it was not unimaginable that the USSR might undertake a manned flyby using the L1/Zond spacecraft in order to beat the Americans.
It was soon clear, however, that these were test transmissions between two ground control centers with the
Zond 6 intercepting and relaying the transmissions.
After the successful U.S. Apollo 8
Apollo 8
Apollo 8, the second manned mission in the American Apollo space program, was the first human spaceflight to leave Earth orbit; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to Earth from another celestial...
manned flight around the Moon, the Soviet manned flyby missions lost political urgency. The first manned flight of L1/Zond spacecraft with Alexey Leonov and Valery Bykovsky planned for the end of 1968 was canceled and Zond spacecraft made only a few unmanned, automatic flights after that.
Andrei Mikoyan
Andrei Mikoyan was reportedly killed together with a second crew member in an attempt to reach the Moon ahead of the Americans in early 1969. Due to system malfunction, they failed to get into lunar orbit and shot past the Moon.This story undoubtedly influenced the plot of an episode of the television series The Cape. The episode "Buried in Peace" first aired on October 28, 1996. In it, a shuttle crew on a mission to repair a communications satellite encounters a derelict Soviet spacecraft with a dead crew—the result of a secret attempt to send a manned mission to the moon 30 years earlier, before the United States. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan in the story.
This story correlates with another claim about the unsuccessful second manned test flight of the N1 rocket.
In popular culture
The lost cosmonauts are referred to in popular culture including art, science fiction and film.- The 2011 mockumentaryMockumentaryA mockumentary , is a type of film or television show in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format. These productions are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues by using a fictitious setting, or to parody the documentary form itself...
film Apollo 18Apollo 18 (film)Apollo 18 is a 2011 American science fiction horror film directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego and produced by Timur Bekmambetov and Ron Schmidt. The film's premise is that the officially canceled Apollo 18 mission was actually launched in December 1973 but never returned, and as a result the United...
depicts NASA astronauts landing on the moon in 1974 and finding a dead cosmonaut along with a wrecked Soviet landing module. - A 2005 Russian mockumentary movie First on the MoonFirst on the MoonFirst on the Moon is a 2005 Russian mockumentary about a 1930s Soviet landing on the Moon. The film, which went on to win many awards, was the debut of the director Aleksey Fedorchenko.The film is not related to the actual Soviet Moonshot program....
(Первые на Луне) features the fictional story of a 1938 Soviet landing on the Moon. - In the 2002 movie K-19: The WidowmakerK-19: The WidowmakerK-19: The Widowmaker is a movie released on July 19, 2002, about the first of many disasters that befell the Soviet submarine of the same name. The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow...
while enjoying some vodka an officer relates a tale of a Lost Cosmonaut before Gagarin who died when his life support system failed. - A 1989 installment of Philip BondPhilip BondPhilip J. Bond is a British comic book artist, who first came to prominence in the late 1980s on Deadline magazine, and later through a number of collaborations with British writers for the DC Comics imprint Vertigo....
's "Wired World", published in the UK comics anthologyAnthologyAn anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
Deadline magazineDeadline magazineDeadline was a British comic magazine published between 1988 and 1995.Created by 2000 AD stalwarts Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon, Deadline featured a mix of comic strips and written articles targeted at older readers...
, features a cosmonaut who crash lands in a London park where the main characters are picnicking. - The upcoming SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
science fiction feature film The CosmonautThe CosmonautThe Cosmonaut is an upcoming Spanish science-fiction feature film directed by Nicolas Alcala and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor. The first feature-length project of Riot Cinema Collective, it is notable for its use of crowdfunding techniques and Creative Commons license in its...
is inspired by accounts of lost cosmonauts. - Victor PelevinVictor PelevinVictor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His books usually carry the outward conventions of the science fiction genre, but are used to construct involved, multi-layered postmodernist texts, fusing together elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies...
's anti-soviet novel "Omon RaOmon RaOmon Ra is a short novel by the modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin, published in 1992 by the Tekst Publishing House in Moscow. It was the first novel by Pelevin, who until then was known for his short stories....
" is based on depiction of Soviet space flights as a planned homicide. Some of these "flights" are also not really flights, but fakes in the sake of Soviet propaganda. - In Metal Gear Solid 3 one of the game's bosses, The Fury, is a lost cosmonaut who was badly burned upon re-entry and served as a secret elite combat operative in Soviet jungles.
- Wolf ParadeWolf ParadeWolf Parade is an indie rock band formed in 2003 from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The band is currently on an indefinite hiatus as of May 31, 2011.-History:...
's song "Yulia" is about a Soviet cosmonaut's fate, drifting in space, never to return home to his love.
See also
- Judica-Cordiglia brothers, Italians who claimed to have recorded the dying moments of several Russian cosmonauts.
- LaikaLaikaLaika was a Soviet space dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth – as well as the first animal to die in orbit.As little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, there...
, Russian dog that became the first creature in space and the first animal to die in space. - Soviet MoonshotSoviet MoonshotThe Soviet manned lunar programs were a series of programs pursued by the Soviet Union to land a man on the Moon in competition with the United States Apollo program to achieve the same goal set publicly by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961...
, the U.S.S.R.'s plans to send a mission to the moon. - Soyuz 1Soyuz 1Soyuz 1 was a manned spaceflight of the Soviet space program. Launched into orbit on April 23, 1967 carrying cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1 was the first flight of the Soyuz spacecraft...
, cosmonaut Vladimir KomarovVladimir KomarovVladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov was a Soviet test pilot, aerospace engineer and cosmonaut in the first group of cosmonauts selected in 1960. He was one of the most highly experienced and well-qualified candidates accepted into "Air Force Group One"....
was killed instantly when his capsule crashed in to the Earth after a chute failure. - Moon landing conspiracy theories, similar theories surrounding the American lunar programme under NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
. - KwangmyŏngsŏngKwangmyŏngsŏngThe Kwangmyŏngsŏng programme is a class of experimental satellites developed by North Korea. The name Kwangmyŏngsŏng The Kwangmyŏngsŏng programme is a class of experimental satellites developed by North Korea. The name Kwangmyŏngsŏng The Kwangmyŏngsŏng programme is a class of experimental...
, a space program begun by North KoreaNorth KoreaThe Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
in the late 1990s. - Space accidents and incidents