There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.
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Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch. “Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.
“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space. At 10.55pm on 2 February 1961, the brothers were scanning Russian frequencies as usual when Achille picked up a transmission from an orbiting capsule. They recorded the wheezing, struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut. The brothers contacted Professor Achille Dogliotti, Italy’s leading cardiologist and recorded his judgement. “I could quite clearly distinguish the clear sounds of forced, panting human breath,” said Dogliotti.
Two days later, the Soviet press agency announced that Russia had sent a seven-and-a-half-tonne spaceship the size of a single-decker bus into space on 2 February, which had burned up during re-entry. No further information was forthcoming.
Had the brothers captured the dying breaths of a cosmonaut?
Would anyone really be all that surprised?
Was not there an assumption that Nikita Kruschev pounded the desk at the UN after hearing that his Cosmonauts, destined to be the first to land on the moon, had, instead, sailed off into Interstellar space? I remember hearing this legend. At any rate, what would be unusual about Russian Cosmonauts dying in flight? Certainly, both US and Russians exploring space are KNOWN to have died. Remember the Cosmonauts who suffocated as they reentered a few years back? And the Space Shuttle has claimed over a dozen young lives. Not to forget, the Apollo astronauts were supplied with suicide pills in case they could not return from their flights.
#2 – I thought the Apollo astronauts were given suicide pills in case they were captured by alien insect overlords, or super-intelligent apes from the future?
#3
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Um, The present Russian government is going to tell you jack and even if they did nobody sane would believe a word they said.
There is no official record of any launch by Russia of any kind on Nov. 30 1960 or Feb. 2 1962. Most of the Russian space program has been shared with us, and Andrew Chaikin is an authority along with James Oberg. Neither one reports any launches on those dates or any launch with no return.
As the author of This Day In Space on Cage Match, I’ve researched all my sources and cannot turn up anything about this.
There have been many Russian failures, and they have all been declassified. Since the Russians have shared all their other fatalities, why not this one? I would think either Chaikin or Olberg would know.
I call BS on this one.
what kind of idiotic question is this?
considering there is a semi-secret military aspect to every shuttle NASA launches, why would anyone either bother to question if a similar project in the russian space program exists. -just how many people have their heads stuck in the sand??
i mean come on, why does it take three days on average for the shuttle to return after finishing its mission objectives.. it orbits the earth about every 90mnutes or so.
-or a few days to reach it’s publicized mission objective on occasion.
then you have all the non-shuttle/space station space launches to ponder, Area 51 activity and
more..
-or maybe they’re just bugging out because the
heliosphere shrunk 25% in the last decade.
*shruG8
with all the government “dirt” being aired out
lately, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’ll get some NASA dirt hitting the news soon as well.
way too many “trial balloon” stories coming out.
i find all the dirty laundry coming to light lately
most curious.. somethings is brewing to be sure.
-s
This is one for coast to coast. A facinating read.
Yeah, they also got to the moon first by days if ya want to be technical. But they crashed, It’s all over the science channel. I don’t think there have been any secrets about their space program since the wall came down.
Great reading. Thanks for posting!
# 7 soundwash – wearing your tinfoil hat this weekend? You don’t just push the “land now” button on the shuttle. Orbital physics dictate when and where you land. Certainly that leaves a lot of spare time. But sinister doings are not the cause.
I thought that David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was based on this an event such as this.
What an amazing story. Should be made into a book or a movie.
Excellent read! Thanks for the link.
And be assured that there are other secret space programs going on within the Air Force that are outside of NASA visibility. The rumored Aurora and Blackstar programs are only indications of what the Air Force capabilities might be today.
Darkstar, a two stage to orbit system with a mothership that resembled the XB-70, was reportedly scrapped after a test phase. It supposedly flew out of Area 51. The Air Force apparently intended to erase it from history. However, Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine reported on it back in 2006 after the program was terminated. The article can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/3ygogk
true or not, it was a great read.
Not the most reliable source. But I knew about the twobrothes back in the 60’s and the story matches what I was hearing about them back then. The story is at least plausible and certainly long lived.
Holy Bad Science Batman!
Nothing the USSR had could push a capsule big enough to hold a human into a Solar System Escape orbit accidentally. Recall that the Voyager probes needed several deliberately planned gravity assists (look it up) to reach System Escape. If the Soviets ever did put a Cosmonaut up and he “missed” lunar orbit, his capsule’s still in orbit of the sun somewhere in our system. Just like the spent upper stages of the Saturn Vs. Or, he got caught in one of the planets’ gravity wells and went down. Either way, nowhere near Interstellar space.
We shouldn’t be so arrogant. We lost 14 astronauts recently.
#10:
/me attaches another ground strap to tinfoil hat
-there is nothing sinister about it. it’s just naive to think that all we (the public) know of the space programs is all that their is.
what little declassified documents there are show
plenty of deception and secrecy as part of the “normal business” of military strategy.
one does not need a tinfoil hat to understand that.
-s
#17, Moose, precisely on target.
In 60 – 62 the USSR didn’t have launch vehicles large enough to attempt a manned moon shot.
I’d like info about the secret space weapons program both the US and USSR have maintained in direct violation of treaties both nations have signed. You don’t think all those secret military shuttle missions had the sole purpose of research now do ya?
Dead body in space, big deal!
#22, amodedoma, One could guess it’s all either sat to sat warfare, or sat to ground/air warfare. What else is there?
The wonderful budget cuts have just cut the Boeing aircraft anti-missile (maybe anti-sat, we don’t know) project down to one aircraft. I’ll guess the military shuttle launches will be cut, too.
I seem to remember that during Apollo 13’s return leg, there was some talk about having the capsule burn up in the atmosphere. Rather than allowing it to orbit the earth as a floating tomb. That was in case the astronauts ran out of air, before getting all the way back. But NASA won’t admit to that now, I’ll bet.
A couple years before 9/11, there was this Tv series called “7 Days”, which was about a man traveling back in time that much to change history. They used a large sphere like capsule, because it often ended up in space, as the earth moved out from under it, at the sphere traveled thru time. An earlier experiment in time travel this way, had failed and apparently left a traveler stranded above the earth. In a few of the series’ closing credits, they would show the wrecked capsule and an astronauts helmet floating by. This shot was replaced by the network, as I’m sure they didn’t like the idea much. And I’ll bet it doesn’t even appear in syndication anymore. And there’s been NO official DVD set, as yet. And when (if ever) there is, I’ll bet the floating dead astronaut credit shot will be MIA. Because Hollywood does what it’s told to do, by the military/aerospace industrial cabal.
Reusing old posts?
I’ll add a thought. There is no freaking way that you are going to get something going fast enough to get out of the solar system using hardware that was designed to just get into orbit and back.
It’s like suggesting that an airliner was accidentally carrying enough fuel to fly around the planet without refueling. No way.
From Billy Meier Contact Reports:
In the 1950s, a disc was privately flown into space with a Russian woman and three men onboard. The initiators of that undertaking were a group that had taken possession of German plans for flying discs after World War II and created their own organization. Some information about these events unexplainably became public and was later falsified to be about a Russian space capsule. The destruction of communications and control functions of the ship was responsible for it going off coarse and expelled into empty space.
Consider; our propaganda sources (National Security State members) have pronounced Russians as unable to match Western aviation-space achievements, most derived from captured German technology. It took us roughly 10 years to yield Redstone, slightly improved over the V-2, yet the Russians increased the range of V-2 derivatives in shorter span of time, since Army Intel Teams were ordered to leave the specialized V-2 production machinery intact inside the Harz Mountain facility in Germany. They like us created a whole range of winged spacecraft projects, as did we here in USA. I’ve collected a number of Bell boost-glider research projects, the many-varied classified Dyna Soar variants stretched, redesigned, widened, and fitted with weapons such as missiles, and even cannon or projectile shooting..read gun type weapons. They were designed at Bell, Martin, Boeing, and other aerospace firms to fulfil the specifications issued by USAF under SR-181. This Doc laid out plans from 1957 or so into the early 1960s something called the EOMSF…Earth Orbital Military Space Force. Planned to become operational in the late 1960s early 1970s, Dyna Soar, lifting body and other designs would form the bulk of the EOMSF, as orbital bombers, orbital bombardment platforms, Sat-Killers, rescue craft, orbital CC platforms (Command & Control it was called in the 1960s), supply vehicles such as SLOMAR and others, on-station research labs, servicing-repair vehicles, either 1 or two man maneuverable units, such as Bell’s REMORA service-repair capsule with tools and arms, and a host of other vehicles from low-earth orbit into cis-lunar space, and beyond as in Project Orion. SR-181 is still classified and is a very touchy subject as one researcher found out during the Cheney Administration, when requsting copies of that series of project studies. He was visited by people from the Nat’l Security State.
USA is an open society hence, heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents who stole, bought, copied, snagged any information concerning our classified aeronautical programs, especially space projects. Their range of space planes ran in parallel with ours, and were projected to operate in the above metioned categories for our SR-181. It is not whether the Russians have or had a secret space program, but what projects did they create within a Black Projects cover similar to our still existing Black Projects Community. Nuff siad.
I find it interesting the Soviets (Russians) had a secret program. I have read that the Soviets had various lost cosmonauts. I find it amazing that if these astronauts were lost back then, then on of the could be now the 1stt human to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. Its sounds like sci-fi, but it could be true. I don’t know. Vic