There were a couple of unusual reasons why Gagarin was chosen for the first flight. The first being that the first man in space needed a great smile because you didn't want a scowl on all those magazine covers. The second was that when the candidates had the opportunity to sit in the capsule Gagarin was the only one who took his boots off before getting in. The engineers felt this showed significant respect for their work and appreciated it.
Another fairly obvious argument against there ever being unsuccessful manned Soviet missions was that surely if there had already been fatal missions which the Soviets wanted to keep secret, they would never have made Gagarin's mission public before he landed safely.
The radio transmissions cited are fairly compelling tho. I'd want to know the true story if nothing else but to give the cosmonauts a proper memorial history-wise.
There's a major point against the Italian recordings. The video touches on a few, but the female cosmonaut was frantically communicating during reentry. During the plasma phase of reentry communication is impossible. If the craft was past that it won't burn up, if it was before... Well, Soviet craft of the time had limited communication windows with mission control, and their reentry burn and actual reentry were both in a blackout zone. One Soyuz cosmonaut was trapped in a pod with the service module still attached and got to watch the hatch and window ablate away. He couldn't radio his experiences, so he frantically wrote down what he could and stuffed the papers inside his suit. Thankfully the service module clamp failed and the descent module flipped back over, which saved him from the fate of Soyuz 1.
as a human that survived soviet union - human life had very little value. soviet military considered up to 11% of its recruits getting killed during peace time an acceptable loss, this is how little human life meant. i am pretty much sure that there were many humans before gagarin, it is far more logical, modus operandi. all megaprojects like railways or road constructions used slave labor, not only the trans siberian raliways, but also for example, via Baltica. The accepted rule with repairing via Baltica is that the concrete roads are not dug up, but reinforced from the top simply because that would mean that we need to identify thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of corpses - political prisoners, prisoners of war etc. I have seen the writings in german myself hidden in the walls, saying "i was here, a prisoner of war, this and that date, i dont know where they will take me or if i will survive this".
It's actually stated that Yuri was heavily slated for Komarov's spot on the rocket that blew up but Komarov, KNOWING the launch was tremendously flawed did not wish his good friend to die so, he demanded to take Yuri's place aboard the doomed rocket. The rest, as they say, is history.
Pretty sure the story is different, Komarov was the primary crew and Yuri was backup, apperently it was obvious the capsule wasn't safe. Komarov had no choice but to go on board as he didn't want to risk Yuri by declining. Further, Yuri is said to have ran up to the launch to try and stop it.
@@MrPbhuh That last part is slightly different, but you are correct on the capsule not being safe. However, it was pressure from higher up that forced them to launch anyway, same as the Challenger. The part that's different is that Yuri Gagarin did try to stop the launch, but couldn't pull enough weight. Now, it was standard procedure for kosmonauts back then (in the Soyuz, at least) to wear a simple wool jumpsuit, and Yuri Gagarin demanded to be put into a full pressure suit and walked up to the launch pad, hoping that they would do the same for Komarov. I don't remember if they did or not, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
"It's actually stated that Yuri was heavily slated for Komarov's spot on the rocket that blew up but Komarov, KNOWING the launch was tremendously flawed did not wish his good friend to die so, he demanded to take Yuri's place aboard the doomed rocket." == Great story, fabricated by a British author to sexy-up his own new book. It makes no sense. The Soyuz-1 mission involved docking with Soyuz-2 and transferring two men from that ship into Soyuz-1. If Komarov knew his own ship was doomed, allowing two more men to join him for the by-him-expected death-dive was just double murder. Siddiqi’s latest authoritative account from flight records finally debunks this speculation.
No, that's a fabricated story from the book "Starman: The Truth Behind the legend of Yuri Gagarin". Made up by the two british authors who's only "source" was some random drunk guard that claimed he knew Gagarin. The reality is a lot less uneventful. Yuri Gagarin was never in the backup crew, nobody that worked on the project believed it would lead to a deadly outcome and Komarov didn't know there was anything wrong with the spacecraft until the parachute and reserve parachute didn't open a few min before is death.
According to “Starman” Gagarin was a low-time pilot and junior officer chosen for his peasant background, not aviation skills. Unlike our Mercury astronauts, he was not a test pilot.
At 13:39 the mass of the rocket was said to be 4730kg, but to clarify, that is the payload that the rocket (and its boosters) was capable of lifting to orbit. The actual weight of the Vostok-K would have been hundreds of thousands of kilograms. Edit: just realized someone else has already pointed this out
I stood next to the concrete statue of Gagarin where he is looking up at space in Kyzylorda, Kazakstan. I also saw the capsule near Bykanor museum made of cheap aluminium and rivets, how it never disintegrated on launch amazes me.
I remember hearing that the Eisenhower administration wasn't too worried about Sputnik 1 because of the small mass/throw weight of about 100 lbs. They were more worried about Sputnik 2 because it' had a throw weight of about one ton which was considered the minimum needed for an ICBM.
they were worried about the implications that the USSR had a reliable enough rocket to achieve the goal when the US were still muddling in the puddles trying to get anything bigger than a sounding rocket off the ground.
The US mistake was largely the choice on the Navy with Vanguard as our sole orbital vehicle. After several failed launch attempts, Army's Von Braun was asked to have a go. And he quickly modified a Jupiter ICBM which was more flight ready. Explorer 1 I believe, was successful on it's first attempt. Eventually a Vanguard succeeded, but the vehicle was pretty much a dead end with no growth potential.
@@jwenting All the evidence points against that. From what I can tell Eisenhower was happy to downplay Sputnik because it served a political purpose. Allowing such overflights to be considered "normal" meant that when spy satellites became a thing (very shortly!) neither side could make a fuss about it. Project Corona was already in the works. It would succeed in returning a mockup film capsule from space in 1959. While the public NASA programs were a disaster, the classified military space program was far ahead of what NASA was doing. That's why Eisenhower wasn't really afraid. The thing is that unusually for a president (and a general!) he didn't have a massive ego. So he figured it was ok to have the public think the US was far behind when in reality that wasn't nearly the case. Can you imagine a president today keeping quiet like that?! Of course Kennedy being clueless about all of this, hammered him during the election.
Eisenhower was not worried about Russia at all - he knew very well that Russia have no aggressive intensions. But establishment of Empire was hysterical - supremacy of the White Man and ability to attack anyone is questioned
I really believe that Yuri's heartbeat was around 64 bpm, let's face the facts the man had huge brass balls to be a test polite and to volunteer for the Soviet space program. A 60 something heartbeat was probably considered him being excited or nervous, the man had to have nerves of steel and knew little to nothing of fear!
I believe it too but the most likely explanation is that he had been given benzodiazepines or some other drug to keep him calm. A lot of the early astronauts were loaded up on a lot of drugs, especially the ones spending several days in space. Can you imagine trying to fall asleep in a Gemini capsule without a sleeping pill?
Test pilots in general are usually quite calm under high stress. Yuri may have been given Benzos, but I doubt if that would have been his choice. The Mercury 7 faught to have capability for manual control, as first designs were totally automated like Sovets
I *love* the way that Simon jokes about his baldness when Keeps does a sponsorship! A really positive attitude and great sense of humour and I really like people with that approach to life!
Simon, the differences in the times taken to carry out various activities during the space between the USSR and the USA are very easily explained. Every step within the USSR was pushed through very fast by the Soviet leaders with a disdain for safety while the US system was delayed due to being heavily bogged down with politicians negotiating whose supporters would get what contract for supplying the equipment needed.
Another reason why the USA lagged behind is that the US Navy and air Force both wanted to be in charge of any space missions and tried to impede the progress made by each other. I did once read that the US could have had the first satellite in space had not a rocket launched by the US Air Force had no fuel in the upper stage - due to the insistence of the Navy.
13:46 The PAYLOAD mass was 4730 kilograms, not the rocket. It would be impossible to launch a spacecraft to orbit with a rocket the same size. The rocket's mass isn't stated in wikipedia, just the payload mass.
Yeah, that bugged me 😂 The Atlas Mercury weighed in at 120Kkg, I assume that I wet mass considering Falcon 9 puts 10 times more into orbit with 5 times the wet mass. Odd how difficult it is to find this kind of data.
It is the whole 'ejecting and landing apart from the capsule' thing that 'officially' queered the deal. According to international rules of aviation and space flight, landing apart from your craft was not considered a 'success' but a big 'whoopsie'. This is why the Soviets claimed for years that he and the capsule set down together. They admitted the truth many years later, but but officials basically accepted the fact that he DID go up and came back alive so, no harm, no foul. And yes, he certainly did make it to space and back, so good on you Yuri.
I spoke with German Titov at length, years ago, on Delta Flight 31 SVO-JFK. He asked me, in Russian, "Misha, do you know who the first man in space was?" "Gagarin," I responded. "Nyet, Misha," he responded. "Gagarin is the first one who came back." To be fair, Titov was well into his cups but there was an air of authenticity in his statement. N.B. Valentina Tereshkova was also on that flight but the two did not sit together.
Titov knew better. Those stories were all over the press at the time, but were either misinterpretations of ground accidents, wild rumors, or tall tales to impress friends.
Komarov's tragic story still gives me nightmares. But I've been hearing about the Ilyushin mission from aerospace experts since probably before you were born. It's sort of an 'open secret' that only two things might reveal the truth: the Russians open their books, or the Chinese do. [edit: I believe Jim Oberg counts as an aerospace expert, last I checked.]
Those Vostok craft were so scaringly crude compared to today's space vehicles. The technological advances since then are truly remarkable, but almost as surprising is that the last manned lunar mission (Apollo 17) was in way back in 1972.
Great show Simon. Even as a kid, I'd always looked upon Gagarin with awe and thought a decent bite-sized doco about him and his amazing achievement was long overdue.
Make that about the American space program, and you'd be condemning the coverup and propaganda. BTW, Gagarin bailed out before the ship landed, nullifying some of the claimed flight records set. Now gaslight us about THAT coverup.
An idea for a mega project that people really don’t talk about is how GPS and satellites make modern life what it is and how drastically life would change if suddenly they all went offline.
There's a TV show that does that. It looks through the technology each country has given to the world and what would happen if it disappeared. I think it was Discovery channel. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it though, it was really interesting.
I'd love to see a video on the red ball express to include not only the truck mission but rail service once it was up and running and how it changed the rate of supply transportation and how important it was to the war efforts of the European War efforts in World War 2. Thank you for the consideration.
It’s most likely true… the soviets only published their successes. Some of the launch disasters ( no both sides) were spectacular. It’s highly unlikely that the soviets managed to get it right the first time.
This is true. There is a colony on the moon. Fascinatingly, they also put deliberate restrictions on their language so it has remained the same as it was over a thousand years ago and they're also accomplished at international banking...no, wait...I'm thinking of somewhere else, sorry.
They were not the first, there were already many people living there. Also, an Irish monk, St. Brendan, probably got to Newfoundland hundreds of years before them.
@@comradekenobi6908 She's a politician. This alone should be enough, but here's more: she pushed for increase of pension age and most recently proposed to remove any restrictions for the number of terms the president of Russia gets. To say she's not popular right now would be an understatement...
Please cover the YF-23 vs the YF-22. It was a huge deciding factor in the Next-gen fighter race, and who would build what would become a billion dollar investment.
Re: Hair loss.....I honestly don't care about my hair, so if it starts falling out, I'll just shave my sweed. It started going grey when I was about 15 and I wasn't bothered about that either, I'd been expecting it as my mother went grey early. I've got green hair now but that's not because I'm trying to hide the natural greyness.
The real Soviet coverup of Vostok 1 is the USSR long claimed that Gagarin rode his spacecraft to the ground, rather than using the ejection seat. Apparently this was done to comply with aeronautical recordbooks, which required the pilot to ride his craft all the way to landing.
@@markuslenzing7386On Vostok 1? Yeah, there was - He ejected from the capsule at about 23000 feet/7 km above the ground. The Vostok capsule didn't land softly enough to be safe to ride all the way down - Plus, the ejection seat allowed some capability to escape if the vehicle had problems (instead of the abort rockets for the capsule most spacecraft use).
There are many “better” planes, but the A10 is my favorite. I’ve seen them fly in person. I’ve also seen armor riddled with holes from one. I’ve fortunately never been in a position where I needed one assisting me. There are other great jets, but the A10 is just AWESOME!
I'm 7 years old and the morning newspaper displayed, with the biggest letters they could find, MAN IN SPACE. I thought "what's the big deal?" my comics have had stories about men in space for years.
According to one account: Gagarins flight was suppose to be at least 2 orbits but Almost from the beginning of the flight difficulties Began to occur. So called proof of issues was Gagarins flight/Landing was several 100 miles off coarse and Gagarins landing was not recorded other then some Photos of the Re-entry module in the field. Inshort Gagarin was lucky to have survived the experience.
I wonder if Gagarin asking where a phone was when he landed was part of the flight plan? "Comrade, we're not sure exactly where you'll land, so when you do, find the nearest phone and call this number"
@@bodan1196 The Chimp the USA sent up came back safely and lived a long life in the national zoo. A little different then letting a dog burn to death like the Russians did
I understand that the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) initially did not recognize the achievement of Gagarin as the first man in space because he did not land in his Vostok spacecraft (he ejected from it), but later it recognized that Gagarin was the first human to fly into space. The FAI or World Air Sports Federation. is the world governing body for air sports, and also stewards definitions regarding human spaceflight. It was founded on 14 October 1905, and is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. It maintains world records for aeronautical activities, including ballooning, aeromodeling, and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), as well as flights into space.
In 1959 Robert Heinlein and his wife spent a month in Russia. When they got back he wrote two non-fiction articles on the experience. "Inside Intourist" is a lightly comical essay on how to avoid getting totally screwed by the Soviet Travel Bureau. The second was called " 'Pravda' means Truth", and is a much darker tale. In it he relates one day. In the early morning Pravda edition The Soviet Union proudly proclaimed that they had launched a man into space. By mid-afternoon reports were coming out that they were having some kind of difficultly with the capsule. That evening the story had completely changed, with Pravda now saying that they had successfully launched an *unmanned* capsule. It's a rather frightening tale both of how easily someone can become an Unperson in a totalitarian State, but also at how effective complete mind control from birth can cause people to believe everything they are told by the government, even when they were told to believe something completely different just hours before.
It’s a fact that Grand Master Heinlein hated Commie guts. And it is also a fact that he made his living by creating (brilliant) fiction. On top of that we know that “Pravda means truth” did not age very well. I mean, it’s so obviously biased that these days no one even takes the trouble of debunking it. Mr. Heinlein was doing what he was good at: painting a picture with words, only this time it was loosely based on what he saw or wished he saw during the trip. I would not count on it as an argument.
Fascist Heinlein is a good fiction - not truth teller. BTW, ‘Pravda’ in russian is not exactly ‘truth’. ‘Truth’ in russian is ‘istina’. ‘Pravda’ have meaning ‘right side’. To the word about wrong translations - Tolstoy never wrote a book named ‘War and peace’ - correct translation will be ‘War and the world(people, society)’. (BTW, not many russians today realises this, because today word ‘mir’ almost never used as ‘the people’ ;-)
This is something I have known about since the early 60’s. I have a cousin who was stationed and worked on the DEW (distant early warning) line in Alaska in 1960 and 1961. He has said since then that he heard transmissions from Russians in space calling for help.
0:03 Been gradually balding since 24. Just hit 28 and I feel I'm rocking the bald look, didn't feel like letting the receding hairline win on its own terms. Just wanted to say your look inspired me to go for it, and don't let anyone tell you it's not a cool look.
As someone who has had a receding hairline since they were 21 and is now 25, I can say pretty much the same thing. I still have plenty of hair (for now) but I've noticed the recession and figure why fight it? I can grow a good beard and also wear glasses so Simon's look definitely helped me decide on letting nature take it's course.
Here is a story I cannot corroborate. My fathers sister was obsessed with everything Russian. She was a school teacher and taught French. She visited the soviet union many times, but was eventually banned from entering the country for smuggling drugs (licorice allsorts, it was in fact bibles!) Anyhow, she asked my father and myself to attend the Russian industrial exhibition at earls court in London in 1968, which we duly did. I would have been 9 years old at the time. I can remember the exhibition as if it were yesterday. They tried their very best to portray a technologically superior civilization, over courteous and possibly a bit patronising. We visited many of the stands, but the one that struck me most of all was the stand that had Yuri Gagarin's spacecraft on it. My aunt Mary began speaking in Russian to the lady manning the stand, within seconds a man wearing a colonel's uniform came from behind the screen at the back and engaged in conversation with her. Mary knew her russion military uniforms, so could identify his rank. He disappeared behind the screen and returned with a soviet childrens book. He gave it to me to which I was prompted to say 'spasibo'. As we walked away, my father turned to me and said 'do you know who that was?' I of course hadn't a clue. He replied, 'That was Yuri Gagarin.' Which strikes me as strange now as Yuri Gagarin was apparently killed five months earlier in a jet crash. As I say, I cannot corroborate this, but it will stick with me forever. Only wish I still had the book.
@davetaylor2088👍👍👍👍👍👍 All these guys were heroes! Doesn't matter if in space, factories, on launch sites, in development offices.... All of those who made it possible!!! Including those who dreamed about possibility of reaching space and not knowing that one day it will happen!
Thank goodness you're throwing in some scepticism regarding the claims of lost cosmonauts. Judica-Cordiglia brothers were talented at receiving actual Soviet and American satellite and spacecraft transmissions, even when the technical radio details were not public information. So, they had a bunch of journalists hanging around at the bunker. They were clearly under pressure to give the journalists something juicy. So if they heard some vague noises that could be interpreted as coming from manned spacecrafts, of course they let everyone know, even when it didn't make sense. My particular favourite was some recording that they claimed had a cosmonaut breathing laboriously and with a distinct dying heartbeat. Never mind that the recording is noisy as hell, and it makes no technical sense to send down medical telemetry as audio. Vostok 1 had EKG and breathing monitors aboard and sent it down as an analog signal!
Other potential space mega projects you can do include Luna 3 (first moon probe), Mercury-Redstone 3 (Alan Shepard’s flight), the Gemini program, Apollo 8 (first trans-lunar injection), Venera 13 and 14 (first landers on Venus), and Pioneer 10 and 11 (first probes to Jupiter and Saturn respectively).
In the late 1960's I was stationed at an Air Force/NSA site in northern Pakistan (the airport where Francis Gary Powers took off from), and it seemed to be common knowledge at that time that Ilyushin was the first cosmonaut, and Gagarin was quickly sent aloft because Ilyushin had indeed crash landed in China. My job was monitoring the Soviet Air Force, but the guys who monitored the Soviet Space launches swore the Ilyushin story was accurate. Since we recorded everything, there might still be a tape somewhere to confirm this event.
The only possibility that I see as viable is that Vladimir Ilyushin was the first in space and survived a very hard landing. He kept quiet about it if it is true and was an incredibly successful test pilot. Gregarin also died a very suspicious death in a Mig just a few years later..
While the cause of Gagarin's death was the subject of the usual Soviet myths, it was not actually suspicious. The problem with the Ilyushin conspiracy theory is that it would require thousands of people to keep quiet about it, not just Ilyushin himself, for many decades even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and that isn't just highly unlikely, it's downright nearly impossible.
I did a presentation on Gagarin for Russian class in school. The sad story is that after his first flight and the overview effect. The Soviet union made him into an exhibition. There are stories of him jumping out of a window because of some girls, breaking his arm. But the trurer story involves alcohol and a driving accident. He also wanted to fly again really bad - and ended up doing assisted suicide with a plane and a friend.
Him jumping of a window was because he was cheating on his wife. When his wife was knocking the door louder and trying to get in he jump of the window.
thank You for and interesting , well researched video. we must remember there courage . Not just the Astronauts , but the rest of the design teams , the people that built the tools to make the parts , the scientists that found the answers Mission control , the list goes on, As a concept everything was designed with slide rules ,pencil and paper drawn and built with minimal actual experiance . Showing that everything builds on everything else
It was about 20 years after Tereshkova flew before the Soviets sent another woman into space just before Sally Ride’s flight. Gagarin landed west of where he was launched from therefore not completing a full orbit. The Soviets lied about that to make it seemed like he made a full orbit. John Glenn’s orbital flight was on an Atlas rocket not a Redstone.
West of the launch site only because the landing site moved east a thousand miles during the brief flight. In inertial space he made a full revolution.
@@JamesOberg Thanks for your reply. I recall also there was some controversy about what the Soviets published about either Gagarin’s launch site or landing site???
@@executivesteps -- After Sputnik they announced it was from the 'Baikonour Cosmodrome' but that town is 200 miles away. The US always referred to it as Tyuratam, a much closer town.
@@JamesOberg Exactly the two names I remember. I thought there was some flap with crediting Gargarin as to the first to orbit the Earth based on that. Another related issue was that he parachuted out of his capsule rather than riding it down to the ground. Was that generally known in the weeks after Gargarin’s flight? I was touring the Soviet Union (high school class trip believe it or not) during the Apollo 11 mission and recall the big front page space story in Pravda was that Luna 16 (iirc) had “completed” it’s mission. Reading that I thought uh-oh and assumed it crashed. The Apollo 11 coverage was on page 3. 😝 Thanks again for responding. I’ve been a long time fan of your work and can say I’ve pretty much read everything you’ve written on the Soviet space program and beyond. I’ve learned an awful lot from your research. Thanks.
Yes, Gagarin was indeed the first man in space. No, the conspiracy "theories" do not hold water. We know about the failures of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 in a fair amount of detail; and also that the missions of Soyuz 4 & 5 (successful docking and the transfer of two cosmonauts from one to the other by spacewalk) and of Soyuz 6, 7 & 8 (failed attempts to dock two spacecraft while the third filmed it) were not without their technical hitches. We even know the name of the dummy that was used to test the ejection seat of the Korabl capsule (the capsule that would later be renamed Vostok). Hell, we even know the names of other dogs that were sent into space as part of the Korabl programme. (Off the top of my head, I can recall Belka, Strelka, Chernyushka and Zvezdochka; and there were two others.) With the state of radar technology in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not possible to put a spacecraft into orbit without the whole world knowing about it.
An untold number of cosmonauts died by suffocation due to pressure loss when the hulls of their capsules would be compromised during the heat generating process of atmospheric reentry, including Gagarin on a later mission.
SUGGESTION: Ilyushin IL-2 - The single most produced military aircraft in aviation history - Visionary WWII ground-attack "flying tank" and spiritual predecessor to the A-10 Warthog - Some WWII German nicknames for it: "meat grinder", "butcher", "black death", "slaughterer", "concrete bird" - What Stalin had to say about it: "Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats."
The Science Fiction Author was Robert A. Heinlein. He an his wife visited the USSR in 1960. They were there when Francis Gary Powers' U2 Spy plane went down. It wasn't cadets who told them about the manned launch, it was in the morning newspapers. The cadets brought it up in conversation. The papers were later removed and new papers talked about the new unmanned launch. He talks about it in 'Expanded Universe,' a collection of stories and essays republished in 1980. For you young whippersnappers, Heinlein is the author of 'Starship Troopers,' which shared only the name with the movie.
I have a commemorative soviet Gagarin coin, with Gagarin's image embossed on it, that was given to me by one of my friends there when he heard that I was interested in the history. A few years later I was able to have my picture taken, holding this coin, whilst standing on the very spot where fragments of an early unmanned Soyuz capsule crashed to earth in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The best part was that it came down in the early 60's on my birthday, and I later got a reply from our own UK astronaut Tim Peake saying he liked the story. So I'm doing it again I suppose. ;-D
I used to work with an ex-Russian. He had been involved in the Soviet space program. He said "Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. But he was not the first man that tried."
famous author robert heinlein in his book "expanded universe" tells a story of when vacationing in russia in 1960 of being approached by a group of communist youths on the street bragging about the amazing launch of a cosmonaut into space (his wife spoke russian). he describes the sinking feeling he felt of the being beaten by the soviets in the space race yet again. it was until much later after the fact that their "handler" explained that the students were in fact wrong and that it was an unmanned rocket carrying a dummy that was launched, he was convinced for the rest of his days that a cosmonaut was launched and lost that day.
Heinlein claims it was in the morning papers. His wife had learned Russian for the trip. The afternoon papers talked about an unmanned launch. All the morning papers had been pulled. Did his wife make a mistake? Did the newspaper make a mistake? Or did someone become an unperson that day?
Side notes: "lika" means "barker" in russian and the soviets played down the fact that poor dog was destined to burn up in the atmosphere on return. Das vidanya, Lika!
I really wish we knew for sure if they sent up cosmonauts before Gagarin. If they did, those individuals deserve to have their names remembered -- they (willingly or unwillingly) sacrificed their lives for scientific understanding and advancement.
News at the time of Yuri Gagarin’s death reported that he stayed in his aircraft and did not eject to avoid crashing in a populated area. Any info that this was actually true?
Here some names of death cosmonauts, bevor Gagarin's flight: Alexej Ledowsky (1957) Serenti Schaborin (1958) Andrej Mitkow (1959) Iwan Katschur (09/27/1960) Piotr Dolgoff (10/11/1960) Alexis Grassiow (December 1960)
"It's coming for you too..." Hahaha. I'm even older than you Simon, so that boat sailed a quarter of a century ago. To be honest I wouldn't go back. I don't miss the hassle of hair washing and styling. So bon voyage gel, mouse and other hair products.
Gherman Titov, Pavel Popovich, and the head of the Russian space program came to our house in Bellevue Washington for Thanksgiving 1992. It was tied to the Space Flight Europe America 500 event where Russia sent a capsule into space containing messages of peace and cooperation, which would later land off the coast of Washington. We happened to know their translator, who we had invited to Thanksgiving. She called the day of, and asked if she could bring them along! Sure! They did not speak any English, but we managed to have a great time anyway. They all wanted their picture taken with the turkey, which was the biggest they had ever seen! They also drank copious amounts of vodka that night. Gherman managed to fall down our stairs on the way out the door, and unfortunately did not feel well enough to attend the opening of the capsule the next day at the Museum of Flight, where he was a guest of honor. It was a great experience, except for that last part! It was an honor to have been able to meet them. There was so much hope back then. It’s sad it has now fallen apart again.
Hey, it was 1992. A time when everything they have believed and dreamed about fell apart and was discarded. Can`t even imagine how hard would it be for them to participate in that event.
I was talking about this with a coworker of mine who escaped the Soviet Union in 1987. He maintained that Gagarin was probably not the first human in space, but the first one to come back… alive. The USSR maintained so much control over the media. To me it seems absolutely plausible.
Is there any evidence that the USSR had the amount of rockets and space vehicles to launch the flights reported to have been recorded by the two brothers prior to Gagarin?
I read a book written by a Russian astronaut. He said they Titov was better pilot than Gagarin and the second mission was more complicated that is why they scheduled Titov for the second mission. Then again everything the Russians say need to be questioned.
That lady Cosmonaut's recordings are very disturbing. The accounts I read about she didn't die in re-entry but was actually lost when she drifted away from earth and probably died a slow death when her oxygen ran out. She could be still out there in space somewhere. Her recordings (in Russian, of course) sound like she knew she was doomed.
Good thing it's pretty much unquestionably fake, huh? She spoke in a very bad accent, not like a native Russian. If she transmitted during reentry, not only would she be talking to no one (since Soviet reentries didn't happen in an area where capsules had radio contact with the ground), she wouldn't be able to reach that no one, because reentry plasma blocks radio signals - So the recording couldn't exist. And, if one understands orbital mechanics, then one understands there is no "drifted off into space" for the same reason there's no such thing as a perpetual motion device - Once you're in orbit, you're in orbit, and unless you have propulsion or have atmospheric drag that slowly pulls you down, you're not going anywhere. You only have so much energy.
It's more that media in the USA had been more independant and the USA has less records of completely changing history itself to fit the narrative. For example the famous photograph of stalin being edited to remove the dissident. And given the fact that the media has ridiculed the early launches, i think vanguard as kaputnik after it crashed does show this relation.
@@MrPbhuh You’re writing that the US media are independent. My question is: What are they independent of? Are you trying to say that a newspaper journalist has a total freedom to promote any political or social views? Please explain.
@@jurekprzychodzen6454 free press is a line. The USSR had little to no free press vs the United States where there was at least a decent degree of it. This can be seen by the fact that in the US you could critique things that were bad or wrong. You weren't just thrown in jail. The red scare is definitely a darker point in US history regarding that, but the red scare is nothing compared to putting people in gulags. Thus when we look back at history and we look at the claims of people, Who is more credible, A country in which no criticism is allowed and everything the state does is great, (sorta like what they wrote about the pharaohs) Or A country in which you get at least an idea of two sides to every tale and there is substantial criticism of bad things that do happen. As much as it feels insulting, the USSR tainted the truth so much that conspiracies become harder to dispel. I personally don't believe in the lost cosmonaut theory, but it wouldn't be the first time the USSR had just deleted people from history.
@@MrPbhuh OMG!! Are you serious? The "independent" US Media have been known to blatantly LIE since the US Civil War. "You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war" - US Media Magnate William R. Hearst 1898 to his journalist to fake stories about Spanish "crimes" in Cuba.
@@MrPbhuh I grew up in communist Poland and you don’t have to explain to me the nature of state controlled media. I was asking if the fact that media are privately owned is a guarantee that they will tell the truth. In my opinion, the answer is no. Who controls the money, controls the narrative. In reality, media tell the truth only if the truth supports their narrative, regardless of the fact wether it is state owned or privately owned. You probably remember when the independent media were peddling the fabricated story of Iraqi WMD’s.
Regarding the success rate of launches in the Soviet Union at that time (50's-odd percent, according to this video) we should note that the success rate of the Atlas was only 54% when it was selected for Project Mercury. Launch Escape Towers cover a multitude of sins!
Thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this video! Head to keeps.com/MEGAPROJECTS to get 50% off your first order of Keeps hair loss treatment.
Did you know that all the hair that is on your head was once inside your head?
i like keeps because i don't have to listen to simon slurp cardboard nuggets.
Can you cover the repayment of lend lease from ww2 and how it was used for political leverage.
13:45 4730 kg is empty mass. Gross mass at launch is MUCH bigger...
@@conanobrien1 think it was typo, try t not kg
There were a couple of unusual reasons why Gagarin was chosen for the first flight. The first being that the first man in space needed a great smile because you didn't want a scowl on all those magazine covers. The second was that when the candidates had the opportunity to sit in the capsule Gagarin was the only one who took his boots off before getting in. The engineers felt this showed significant respect for their work and appreciated it.
he was also very smol
@@janslavik5284 1.5 m if I'm right
@@contestant1585 yeah, saw his spacesuit in an exhibition, it looked very child-sized
He had 2 competitors Titov and Nelubov. Nelubov’s surname can be translated from Russian language as not love and Titov did not have a Russian name
@@DrEugen06Герман русское имя. Загугли
Another fairly obvious argument against there ever being unsuccessful manned Soviet missions was that surely if there had already been fatal missions which the Soviets wanted to keep secret, they would never have made Gagarin's mission public before he landed safely.
Yes, exactly!!
The radio transmissions cited are fairly compelling tho. I'd want to know the true story if nothing else but to give the cosmonauts a proper memorial history-wise.
There's a major point against the Italian recordings. The video touches on a few, but the female cosmonaut was frantically communicating during reentry. During the plasma phase of reentry communication is impossible. If the craft was past that it won't burn up, if it was before... Well, Soviet craft of the time had limited communication windows with mission control, and their reentry burn and actual reentry were both in a blackout zone.
One Soyuz cosmonaut was trapped in a pod with the service module still attached and got to watch the hatch and window ablate away. He couldn't radio his experiences, so he frantically wrote down what he could and stuffed the papers inside his suit. Thankfully the service module clamp failed and the descent module flipped back over, which saved him from the fate of Soyuz 1.
@@mgabrysSF They where disproveb ages ago
I belive they even identified the voice as an italian woman
as a human that survived soviet union - human life had very little value. soviet military considered up to 11% of its recruits getting killed during peace time an acceptable loss, this is how little human life meant.
i am pretty much sure that there were many humans before gagarin, it is far more logical, modus operandi.
all megaprojects like railways or road constructions used slave labor, not only the trans siberian raliways, but also for example, via Baltica. The accepted rule with repairing via Baltica is that the concrete roads are not dug up, but reinforced from the top simply because that would mean that we need to identify thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of corpses - political prisoners, prisoners of war etc. I have seen the writings in german myself hidden in the walls, saying "i was here, a prisoner of war, this and that date, i dont know where they will take me or if i will survive this".
Restoring Simon’s hair would be a mega project
Hair Blaze?
😲😲😲
ouch
Cold bloooooded
Damn Daniel, that’s cold AF
It's actually stated that Yuri was heavily slated for Komarov's spot on the rocket that blew up but Komarov, KNOWING the launch was tremendously flawed did not wish his good friend to die so, he demanded to take Yuri's place aboard the doomed rocket. The rest, as they say, is history.
Pretty sure the story is different,
Komarov was the primary crew and Yuri was backup, apperently it was obvious the capsule wasn't safe.
Komarov had no choice but to go on board as he didn't want to risk Yuri by declining.
Further, Yuri is said to have ran up to the launch to try and stop it.
@@MrPbhuh That last part is slightly different, but you are correct on the capsule not being safe. However, it was pressure from higher up that forced them to launch anyway, same as the Challenger.
The part that's different is that Yuri Gagarin did try to stop the launch, but couldn't pull enough weight. Now, it was standard procedure for kosmonauts back then (in the Soyuz, at least) to wear a simple wool jumpsuit, and Yuri Gagarin demanded to be put into a full pressure suit and walked up to the launch pad, hoping that they would do the same for Komarov. I don't remember if they did or not, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
"It's actually stated that Yuri was heavily slated for Komarov's spot on the rocket that blew up but Komarov, KNOWING the launch was tremendously flawed did not wish his good friend to die so, he demanded to take Yuri's place aboard the doomed rocket." == Great story, fabricated by a British author to sexy-up his own new book. It makes no sense. The Soyuz-1 mission involved docking with Soyuz-2 and transferring two men from that ship into Soyuz-1. If Komarov knew his own ship was doomed, allowing two more men to join him for the by-him-expected death-dive was just double murder. Siddiqi’s latest authoritative account from flight records finally debunks this speculation.
No, that's a fabricated story from the book "Starman: The Truth Behind the legend of Yuri Gagarin". Made up by the two british authors who's only "source" was some random drunk guard that claimed he knew Gagarin.
The reality is a lot less uneventful. Yuri Gagarin was never in the backup crew, nobody that worked on the project believed it would lead to a deadly outcome and Komarov didn't know there was anything wrong with the spacecraft until the parachute and reserve parachute didn't open a few min before is death.
According to “Starman” Gagarin was a low-time pilot and junior officer chosen for his peasant background, not aviation skills. Unlike our Mercury astronauts, he was not a test pilot.
At 13:39 the mass of the rocket was said to be 4730kg, but to clarify, that is the payload that the rocket (and its boosters) was capable of lifting to orbit. The actual weight of the Vostok-K would have been hundreds of thousands of kilograms.
Edit: just realized someone else has already pointed this out
About 280 tonnes.
Ok, that explains a lot, I was really surprised when he said that, but 280 tonnes make a lot more sense, I wonder if that is with full thanks (fuel)
280,000 kilograms lol
I thought that was very light for a rocket flying a space capsule into outer space.
I stood next to the concrete statue of Gagarin where he is looking up at space in Kyzylorda, Kazakstan. I also saw the capsule near Bykanor museum made of cheap aluminium and rivets, how it never disintegrated on launch amazes me.
I remember hearing that the Eisenhower administration wasn't too worried about Sputnik 1 because of the small mass/throw weight of about 100 lbs. They were more worried about Sputnik 2 because it' had a throw weight of about one ton which was considered the minimum needed for an ICBM.
they were worried about the implications that the USSR had a reliable enough rocket to achieve the goal when the US were still muddling in the puddles trying to get anything bigger than a sounding rocket off the ground.
The US mistake was largely the choice on the Navy with Vanguard as our sole orbital vehicle. After several failed launch attempts, Army's Von Braun was asked to have a go. And he quickly modified a Jupiter ICBM which was more flight ready. Explorer 1 I believe, was successful on it's first attempt. Eventually a Vanguard succeeded, but the vehicle was pretty much a dead end with no growth potential.
@@jwenting All the evidence points against that. From what I can tell Eisenhower was happy to downplay Sputnik because it served a political purpose. Allowing such overflights to be considered "normal" meant that when spy satellites became a thing (very shortly!) neither side could make a fuss about it. Project Corona was already in the works. It would succeed in returning a mockup film capsule from space in 1959. While the public NASA programs were a disaster, the classified military space program was far ahead of what NASA was doing. That's why Eisenhower wasn't really afraid. The thing is that unusually for a president (and a general!) he didn't have a massive ego. So he figured it was ok to have the public think the US was far behind when in reality that wasn't nearly the case. Can you imagine a president today keeping quiet like that?! Of course Kennedy being clueless about all of this, hammered him during the election.
Eisenhower also knew about the growing progress of the highly secret Corona photo-recon Project. He chose not to divulge that publicly.
Eisenhower was not worried about Russia at all - he knew very well that Russia have no aggressive intensions. But establishment of Empire was hysterical - supremacy of the White Man and ability to attack anyone is questioned
I really believe that Yuri's heartbeat was around 64 bpm, let's face the facts the man had huge brass balls to be a test polite and to volunteer for the Soviet space program. A 60 something heartbeat was probably considered him being excited or nervous, the man had to have nerves of steel and knew little to nothing of fear!
Total legend.
I believe it too but the most likely explanation is that he had been given benzodiazepines or some other drug to keep him calm. A lot of the early astronauts were loaded up on a lot of drugs, especially the ones spending several days in space. Can you imagine trying to fall asleep in a Gemini capsule without a sleeping pill?
I agree. Though I would not be surprised in the slightest if a mild dose of an early Soviet equivalent of diazepam was administered.
Test pilots in general are usually quite calm under high stress. Yuri may have been given Benzos, but I doubt if that would have been his choice. The Mercury 7 faught to have capability for manual control, as first designs were totally automated like Sovets
I wish I could get my heart rate down that low.
3:00 - Chapter 1 - The space race
4:45 - Chapter 2 - Humans in space
6:15 - Chapter 3 - The lost cosmonauts
7:45 - Chapter 4 - Early rumours
8:35 - Chapter 5 - The torre bert recordings
11:20 - Chapter 6 - Vostok 1
12:45 - Chapter 7 - The spacecraft
14:10 - Chapter 8 - 04/12/1961
17:35 - Chapter 9 - History maker
USA astronauts safely landed on the moon, or not?
I *love* the way that Simon jokes about his baldness when Keeps does a sponsorship!
A really positive attitude and great sense of humour and I really like people with that approach to life!
Simon, the differences in the times taken to carry out various activities during the space between the USSR and the USA are very easily explained. Every step within the USSR was pushed through very fast by the Soviet leaders with a disdain for safety while the US system was delayed due to being heavily bogged down with politicians negotiating whose supporters would get what contract for supplying the equipment needed.
we litraly didnt care because we new 1st to the moon one the race
Another reason why the USA lagged behind is that the US Navy and air Force both wanted to be in charge of any space missions and tried to impede the progress made by each other. I did once read that the US could have had the first satellite in space had not a rocket launched by the US Air Force had no fuel in the upper stage - due to the insistence of the Navy.
The disdain for safety thing, which comic book research does it come from?
As far as I'm aware US has the most fatalities in the space race. So... who was "pushing at all costs"?
@@coobit yup... the soviets never had a death trap like the space shittle
13:46 The PAYLOAD mass was 4730 kilograms, not the rocket. It would be impossible to launch a spacecraft to orbit with a rocket the same size. The rocket's mass isn't stated in wikipedia, just the payload mass.
Came to the comments to see if anyone else picked up on it!!! Lol-bulky
Man his videos are riddled with errors like that, feel like they just skim Wikipedia and toss the info into a clip
Yeah, that bugged me 😂 The Atlas Mercury weighed in at 120Kkg, I assume that I wet mass considering Falcon 9 puts 10 times more into orbit with 5 times the wet mass. Odd how difficult it is to find this kind of data.
@@MilanVVVVV Possibly because he has so many channels, 11 in total I think. But still, it's like 95% accurate
Sorry, yes, thank you for the correction :)
It is the whole 'ejecting and landing apart from the capsule' thing that 'officially' queered the deal. According to international rules of aviation and space flight, landing apart from your craft was not considered a 'success' but a big 'whoopsie'. This is why the Soviets claimed for years that he and the capsule set down together. They admitted the truth many years later, but but officials basically accepted the fact that he DID go up and came back alive so, no harm, no foul. And yes, he certainly did make it to space and back, so good on you Yuri.
Say "no" to drugs.
He is right m0r0n @@serpentpaints
There were "international rules for space flight" when Gargarin first flew???
@@jpdemer5 Yes there were.
@@tbyte007 [citation needed]
I spoke with German Titov at length, years ago, on Delta Flight 31 SVO-JFK. He asked me, in Russian, "Misha, do you know who the first man in space was?" "Gagarin," I responded. "Nyet, Misha," he responded. "Gagarin is the first one who came back." To be fair, Titov was well into his cups but there was an air of authenticity in his statement. N.B. Valentina Tereshkova was also on that flight but the two did not sit together.
Titov knew better. Those stories were all over the press at the time, but were either misinterpretations of ground accidents, wild rumors, or tall tales to impress friends.
and now she sits in ruzzian duma and rubber stamps everything that pootin does. a true hero ffs
Komarov's tragic story still gives me nightmares. But I've been hearing about the Ilyushin mission from aerospace experts since probably before you were born. It's sort of an 'open secret' that only two things might reveal the truth: the Russians open their books, or the Chinese do.
[edit: I believe Jim Oberg counts as an aerospace expert, last I checked.]
Last =I= checked, too. [grin]
Those Vostok craft were so scaringly crude compared to today's space vehicles. The technological advances since then are truly remarkable, but almost as surprising is that the last manned lunar mission (Apollo 17) was in way back in 1972.
Still surprisingly advanced considering it was the early 60's and they had an automated system.
You could call it little more than a guided bullet.
Great show Simon. Even as a kid, I'd always looked upon Gagarin with awe and thought a decent bite-sized doco about him and his amazing achievement was long overdue.
If several people died in earlier manned flights, it makes what Yuri Gagarin did even more remarkable. He truly WAS a hero of the Soviet Union.
Hell of a way to be a hero.
A hero of mankind really.
When Shatner is in the spotlight it is very insightful to find out the history of the people who proceeded him.
Make that about the American space program, and you'd be condemning the coverup and propaganda.
BTW, Gagarin bailed out before the ship landed, nullifying some of the claimed flight records set. Now gaslight us about THAT coverup.
@@fumblerooskie Without him, we wouldn't have the moon landings really.
They were in such a hurry to be first that it's entirely plausible that they would risk lives unnecessarily and cover up any failed missions.
Personally I only believe the Ilyushin theory, makes sense, test pilots usually go first, the Italians cant be trusted, too many inconsistencies.
For those who do not follow hockey, the championship trophy of Russia's top league (the KHL) is called the Gagarin Cup.
An idea for a mega project that people really don’t talk about is how GPS and satellites make modern life what it is and how drastically life would change if suddenly they all went offline.
Good idea
I still have my Esso maps.
Key point: Nuclear warfare is the reason why we have GPS today.
(Same for jet airliners, digital photography, the internet, etc, etc.)
There's a TV show that does that. It looks through the technology each country has given to the world and what would happen if it disappeared. I think it was Discovery channel. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it though, it was really interesting.
Sounds an episode of.. 'what if!?'
I'd love to see a video on the red ball express to include not only the truck mission but rail service once it was up and running and how it changed the rate of supply transportation and how important it was to the war efforts of the European War efforts in World War 2. Thank you for the consideration.
The other aspect of the Italian brothers’ recordings is that *apparently* the doomed cosmonaut in question had a noticeable Italian accent lol
It was their sister!😂
the title is almost bordering on History channel consipracy theory levels
It’s most likely true… the soviets only published their successes. Some of the launch disasters ( no both sides) were spectacular. It’s highly unlikely that the soviets managed to get it right the first time.
Must be after midnight
I'm not sayin that it's aliens, but.....
@Henry J. where are we going next?
I thought it was a good piece, because it didn’t give excess credibility to the reports of that Italian pair.
The Vikings were the first in space. A few years after they discovered America, they also went into space.
The Viking exploded on take-off
This is true. There is a colony on the moon. Fascinatingly, they also put deliberate restrictions on their language so it has remained the same as it was over a thousand years ago and they're also accomplished at international banking...no, wait...I'm thinking of somewhere else, sorry.
Its somehow true as the russians are descended from vikings.
They were not the first, there were already many people living there.
Also, an Irish monk, St. Brendan, probably got to Newfoundland hundreds of years before them.
Also Yuri was black, and he teached the natives of the earth how to build pyramids in the past
Yuri: "So, what's the override code?"
Control: "12345678"
"It's the same code Premier Khrushchev has on his luggage."
@@ronbutler3431 Space Balls much? LOL! Well played.
@@ronbutler3431 To be fair, who would be insane enough to steal the Soviet Premier's luggage? Straight to Gulag!
That's very close to the secret launch code for Russian ICBM's: "123".
@@ronbutler3431 Beat me to it.
I'd love to see a whole Biographics on Valentina please!
Better not. It's one of the cases when you die a hero or live long enough to become a villian. And she's 84 now.
@@5gvaccinator343 unless you're a rabid feminist
@@5gvaccinator343 what did she do lol
@@comradekenobi6908 She's a politician. This alone should be enough, but here's more: she pushed for increase of pension age and most recently proposed to remove any restrictions for the number of terms the president of Russia gets. To say she's not popular right now would be an understatement...
@@akromabdurakhmonov5900 increase of pension age? What's wrong with it
Please cover the YF-23 vs the YF-22.
It was a huge deciding factor in the Next-gen fighter race, and who would build what would become a billion dollar investment.
I have seen that Japan may be able to save the black widow 2
Yes. YES! YES!!!
Re: Hair loss.....I honestly don't care about my hair, so if it starts falling out, I'll just shave my sweed. It started going grey when I was about 15 and I wasn't bothered about that either, I'd been expecting it as my mother went grey early. I've got green hair now but that's not because I'm trying to hide the natural greyness.
The real Soviet coverup of Vostok 1 is the USSR long claimed that Gagarin rode his spacecraft to the ground, rather than using the ejection seat. Apparently this was done to comply with aeronautical recordbooks, which required the pilot to ride his craft all the way to landing.
There was no ejection seat.
@@markuslenzing7386On Vostok 1? Yeah, there was - He ejected from the capsule at about 23000 feet/7 km above the ground. The Vostok capsule didn't land softly enough to be safe to ride all the way down - Plus, the ejection seat allowed some capability to escape if the vehicle had problems (instead of the abort rockets for the capsule most spacecraft use).
Only recently found this channel and been loving watching all the space program and war/spy plane vids. Would love to see one on the A10 Warthog. :)
There are many “better” planes, but the A10 is my favorite. I’ve seen them fly in person. I’ve also seen armor riddled with holes from one. I’ve fortunately never been in a position where I needed one assisting me.
There are other great jets, but the A10 is just AWESOME!
He has loads of other channels with similar stuff look on community
He's got a few channels if you weren't aware
I thought he already had? 🤔 he's covered heaps of planes, I could be wrong though so maybe just search it up
I'm 7 years old and the morning newspaper displayed, with the biggest letters they could find, MAN IN SPACE. I thought "what's the big deal?" my comics have had stories about men in space for years.
According to one account: Gagarins flight was suppose to be at least 2 orbits but Almost from the beginning of the flight difficulties Began to occur. So called proof of issues was Gagarins flight/Landing was several 100 miles off coarse and Gagarins landing was not recorded other then some Photos of the Re-entry module in the field. Inshort Gagarin was lucky to have survived the experience.
I wonder if Gagarin asking where a phone was when he landed was part of the flight plan?
"Comrade, we're not sure exactly where you'll land, so when you do, find the nearest phone and call this number"
Eh, they were obviously tracking him upon the descent. But it might take time for the recovery team to show up.
The sad story of Laika, the first dog into space should be covered as well.
Just another victim of Communism
@@DMS-pq8 Yeah, sending up dogs when you can send up chimpansees. Savages.
@@bodan1196 The Chimp the USA sent up came back safely and lived a long life in the national zoo. A little different then letting a dog burn to death like the Russians did
Laika wasn't the first dog in space. Her only achievement was reaching _orbit._
@@DMS-pq8 You are not wrong, but...
I understand that the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) initially did not recognize the achievement of Gagarin as the first man in space because he did not land in his Vostok spacecraft (he ejected from it), but later it recognized that Gagarin was the first human to fly into space. The FAI or World Air Sports Federation. is the world governing body for air sports, and also stewards definitions regarding human spaceflight. It was founded on 14 October 1905, and is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. It maintains world records for aeronautical activities, including ballooning, aeromodeling, and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), as well as flights into space.
In 1959 Robert Heinlein and his wife spent a month in Russia. When they got back he wrote two non-fiction articles on the experience. "Inside Intourist" is a lightly comical essay on how to avoid getting totally screwed by the Soviet Travel Bureau. The second was called " 'Pravda' means Truth", and is a much darker tale.
In it he relates one day. In the early morning Pravda edition The Soviet Union proudly proclaimed that they had launched a man into space. By mid-afternoon reports were coming out that they were having some kind of difficultly with the capsule. That evening the story had completely changed, with Pravda now saying that they had successfully launched an *unmanned* capsule.
It's a rather frightening tale both of how easily someone can become an Unperson in a totalitarian State, but also at how effective complete mind control from birth can cause people to believe everything they are told by the government, even when they were told to believe something completely different just hours before.
It’s a fact that Grand Master Heinlein hated Commie guts. And it is also a fact that he made his living by creating (brilliant) fiction. On top of that we know that “Pravda means truth” did not age very well. I mean, it’s so obviously biased that these days no one even takes the trouble of debunking it. Mr. Heinlein was doing what he was good at: painting a picture with words, only this time it was loosely based on what he saw or wished he saw during the trip. I would not count on it as an argument.
Fascist Heinlein is a good fiction - not truth teller. BTW, ‘Pravda’ in russian is not exactly ‘truth’. ‘Truth’ in russian is ‘istina’. ‘Pravda’ have meaning ‘right side’.
To the word about wrong translations - Tolstoy never wrote a book named ‘War and peace’ - correct translation will be ‘War and the world(people, society)’. (BTW, not many russians today realises this, because today word ‘mir’ almost never used as ‘the people’ ;-)
This is something I have known about since the early 60’s. I have a cousin who was stationed and worked on the DEW (distant early warning) line in Alaska in 1960 and 1961. He has said since then that he heard transmissions from Russians in space calling for help.
0:03 Been gradually balding since 24. Just hit 28 and I feel I'm rocking the bald look, didn't feel like letting the receding hairline win on its own terms.
Just wanted to say your look inspired me to go for it, and don't let anyone tell you it's not a cool look.
As someone who has had a receding hairline since they were 21 and is now 25, I can say pretty much the same thing. I still have plenty of hair (for now) but I've noticed the recession and figure why fight it? I can grow a good beard and also wear glasses so Simon's look definitely helped me decide on letting nature take it's course.
Here is a story I cannot corroborate. My fathers sister was obsessed with everything Russian. She was a school teacher and taught French. She visited the soviet union many times, but was eventually banned from entering the country for smuggling drugs (licorice allsorts, it was in fact bibles!) Anyhow, she asked my father and myself to attend the Russian industrial exhibition at earls court in London in 1968, which we duly did. I would have been 9 years old at the time. I can remember the exhibition as if it were yesterday. They tried their very best to portray a technologically superior civilization, over courteous and possibly a bit patronising. We visited many of the stands, but the one that struck me most of all was the stand that had Yuri Gagarin's spacecraft on it. My aunt Mary began speaking in Russian to the lady manning the stand, within seconds a man wearing a colonel's uniform came from behind the screen at the back and engaged in conversation with her. Mary knew her russion military uniforms, so could identify his rank. He disappeared behind the screen and returned with a soviet childrens book. He gave it to me to which I was prompted to say 'spasibo'. As we walked away, my father turned to me and said 'do you know who that was?' I of course hadn't a clue. He replied, 'That was Yuri Gagarin.' Which strikes me as strange now as Yuri Gagarin was apparently killed five months earlier in a jet crash. As I say, I cannot corroborate this, but it will stick with me forever. Only wish I still had the book.
Yuri Gagarin was not a hero of the Soviet Union, he was a hero of the entire human race.
Many testicles! Test pilots are really an alien species
Sergei Korolev the man behind it all was the true hero of humanity
@davetaylor2088👍👍👍👍👍👍
All these guys were heroes!
Doesn't matter if in space, factories,
on launch sites, in development
offices....
All of those who made it possible!!!
Including those who dreamed about possibility of reaching space and not
knowing that one day it will happen!
This brings back memories.
I remember hearing the Sputnik beeping with my shortwave radio.
Great video ! Vostok K's weight is wrong.... wikipedia 🤦🏻♂️. 4730 KG is payload into orbit. Rocket weighs 280T.
The spacecraft itself weighed around the 4730kg . The launch rocket itself weighs around 280T
17:31 imagine being the person who pick up that phone call
"Hey, Yuri, is that you?"
"What's going on, man?"
"Oh, you went around the world and you just got back?"
"Gee, I'd like to be able to travel too."
Thank goodness you're throwing in some scepticism regarding the claims of lost cosmonauts.
Judica-Cordiglia brothers were talented at receiving actual Soviet and American satellite and spacecraft transmissions, even when the technical radio details were not public information. So, they had a bunch of journalists hanging around at the bunker. They were clearly under pressure to give the journalists something juicy. So if they heard some vague noises that could be interpreted as coming from manned spacecrafts, of course they let everyone know, even when it didn't make sense.
My particular favourite was some recording that they claimed had a cosmonaut breathing laboriously and with a distinct dying heartbeat. Never mind that the recording is noisy as hell, and it makes no technical sense to send down medical telemetry as audio. Vostok 1 had EKG and breathing monitors aboard and sent it down as an analog signal!
One simple reason: US will *never* admit they can be bested in anything, anything at all, even temporarily.
@@mihan2d Given how many astronauts were given state funerals, I'd say you're quite off the mark in that regard.
Other potential space mega projects you can do include Luna 3 (first moon probe), Mercury-Redstone 3 (Alan Shepard’s flight), the Gemini program, Apollo 8 (first trans-lunar injection), Venera 13 and 14 (first landers on Venus), and Pioneer 10 and 11 (first probes to Jupiter and Saturn respectively).
In the late 1960's I was stationed at an Air Force/NSA site in northern Pakistan (the airport where Francis Gary Powers took off from), and it seemed to be common knowledge at that time that Ilyushin was the first cosmonaut, and Gagarin was quickly sent aloft because Ilyushin had indeed crash landed in China. My job was monitoring the Soviet Air Force, but the guys who monitored the Soviet Space launches swore the Ilyushin story was accurate. Since we recorded everything, there might still be a tape somewhere to confirm this event.
...The man from Peshawar.
I was never there, but I was stationed at Incirlik for a time, and heard the same about Mr. Ilyushin.
In deep space, all alone, Keeps will not help you in a hairy situation!
🤣🤣🤣 Now that is illarrious 🙏
The only possibility that I see as viable is that Vladimir Ilyushin was the first in space and survived a very hard landing. He kept quiet about it if it is true and was an incredibly successful test pilot.
Gregarin also died a very suspicious death in a Mig just a few years later..
I have not heard of this story. I'm gonna look into it. Sounds interesting
The only way to determine if Ilyushin was the first in space would be if the Chinese came out and stated, "yes he landed here" or "no he didn't."
While the cause of Gagarin's death was the subject of the usual Soviet myths, it was not actually suspicious.
The problem with the Ilyushin conspiracy theory is that it would require thousands of people to keep quiet about it, not just Ilyushin himself, for many decades even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and that isn't just highly unlikely, it's downright nearly impossible.
@@CaptHollister clearly, you don’t understand the Russian mentality.
getting more popular then the soviet leadership was always dangerous to ones health in the soviet union.
Super great vid. Thank you Simon, I love all your videos and not just from Megaprojects. Some are so good we watch them 2 or even 3 times.
He was not a mongrel dog. He was a good boy.
She
Girl
I did a presentation on Gagarin for Russian class in school. The sad story is that after his first flight and the overview effect. The Soviet union made him into an exhibition. There are stories of him jumping out of a window because of some girls, breaking his arm. But the trurer story involves alcohol and a driving accident. He also wanted to fly again really bad - and ended up doing assisted suicide with a plane and a friend.
Him jumping of a window was because he was cheating on his wife. When his wife was knocking the door louder and trying to get in he jump of the window.
CIA rummors
Simon doesn't suffer from hair loss, he just has his head on upside down
That can be cured, but the surgery is way complicated, and painful!
thank You for and interesting , well researched video. we must remember there courage . Not just the Astronauts , but the rest of the design teams , the people that built the tools to make the parts , the scientists that found the answers Mission control , the list goes on, As a concept everything was designed with slide rules ,pencil and paper drawn and built with minimal actual experiance . Showing that everything builds on everything else
First city abroad that he visited was Manchester. Home of the industrial revolution, the computer and all that jazz. Legend!!!!
Im 27 now and my hair is super thin on top now but i think im gonna just embrace it. You look good bald simon!
It was about 20 years after Tereshkova flew before the Soviets sent another woman into space just before Sally Ride’s flight.
Gagarin landed west of where he was launched from therefore not completing a full orbit. The Soviets lied about that to make it seemed like he made a full orbit.
John Glenn’s orbital flight was on an Atlas rocket not a Redstone.
West of the launch site only because the landing site moved east a thousand miles during the brief flight. In inertial space he made a full revolution.
@@JamesOberg Thanks for your reply. I recall also there was some controversy about what the Soviets published about either Gagarin’s launch site or landing site???
@@executivesteps -- After Sputnik they announced it was from the 'Baikonour Cosmodrome' but that town is 200 miles away. The US always referred to it as Tyuratam, a much closer town.
@@JamesOberg Exactly the two names I remember. I thought there was some flap with crediting Gargarin as to the first to orbit the Earth based on that.
Another related issue was that he parachuted out of his capsule rather than riding it down to the ground. Was that generally known in the weeks after Gargarin’s flight?
I was touring the Soviet Union (high school class trip believe it or not) during the Apollo 11 mission and recall the big front page space story in Pravda was that Luna 16 (iirc) had “completed” it’s mission. Reading that I thought uh-oh and assumed it crashed. The Apollo 11 coverage was on page 3. 😝
Thanks again for responding. I’ve been a long time fan of your work and can say I’ve pretty much read everything you’ve written on the Soviet space program and beyond.
I’ve learned an awful lot from your research.
Thanks.
Gagarin’s daughter or grand daughter is a United Airlines flight attendant. I was a United pilot/captain and she was on my crew on one of my flights.
Yes, Gagarin was indeed the first man in space.
No, the conspiracy "theories" do not hold water.
We know about the failures of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 in a fair amount of detail; and also that the missions of Soyuz 4 & 5 (successful docking and the transfer of two cosmonauts from one to the other by spacewalk) and of Soyuz 6, 7 & 8 (failed attempts to dock two spacecraft while the third filmed it) were not without their technical hitches. We even know the name of the dummy that was used to test the ejection seat of the Korabl capsule (the capsule that would later be renamed Vostok). Hell, we even know the names of other dogs that were sent into space as part of the Korabl programme. (Off the top of my head, I can recall Belka, Strelka, Chernyushka and Zvezdochka; and there were two others.)
With the state of radar technology in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not possible to put a spacecraft into orbit without the whole world knowing about it.
An untold number of cosmonauts died by suffocation due to pressure loss when the hulls of their capsules would be compromised during the heat generating process of atmospheric reentry, including Gagarin on a later mission.
Yuri’s smile is so iconic
SUGGESTION: Ilyushin IL-2
- The single most produced military aircraft in aviation history
- Visionary WWII ground-attack "flying tank" and spiritual predecessor to the A-10 Warthog
- Some WWII German nicknames for it: "meat grinder", "butcher", "black death", "slaughterer", "concrete bird"
- What Stalin had to say about it: "Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats."
New released footage shows that the first person to go to space was actually a Soviet Vampire girl. They're releasing the documentary right now.
The Science Fiction Author was Robert A. Heinlein. He an his wife visited the USSR in 1960. They were there when Francis Gary Powers' U2 Spy plane went down. It wasn't cadets who told them about the manned launch, it was in the morning newspapers. The cadets brought it up in conversation. The papers were later removed and new papers talked about the new unmanned launch. He talks about it in 'Expanded Universe,' a collection of stories and essays republished in 1980.
For you young whippersnappers, Heinlein is the author of 'Starship Troopers,' which shared only the name with the movie.
8:24 Russian version of "test dummies" is two guys with a gun pointed at you saying, "It's a rocket test, now get in the capsule dummies"
Who else reads the quoted part with a Russian accent?
@@schylersmith1484 yes! That's exactly how I typed it. LMAO 🤣
Yuri "yes im the first man in space" soviets "first one to survive"
Very Brave Man RIP Yuri .
It was said that Gagarin had a smile that lit up the cold war.
Please Mr Whistler. Please. The Venus Project. 🥺
I have a commemorative soviet Gagarin coin, with Gagarin's image embossed on it, that was given to me by one of my friends there when he heard that I was interested in the history. A few years later I was able to have my picture taken, holding this coin, whilst standing on the very spot where fragments of an early unmanned Soyuz capsule crashed to earth in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The best part was that it came down in the early 60's on my birthday, and I later got a reply from our own UK astronaut Tim Peake saying he liked the story.
So I'm doing it again I suppose. ;-D
Great anecdotes!!
I used to work with an ex-Russian. He had been involved in the Soviet space program. He said "Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. But he was not the first man that tried."
My favourite chanell out of Simon's channels....awesome editing and subjects...🙂
I have you beat Simon, I lost most of my hair starting at 15
He was a Hero. They all were Heroes.
Yuri Gagarin was the first.
famous author robert heinlein in his book "expanded universe" tells a story of when vacationing in russia in 1960 of being approached by a group of communist youths on the street bragging about the amazing launch of a cosmonaut into space (his wife spoke russian). he describes the sinking feeling he felt of the being beaten by the soviets in the space race yet again. it was until much later after the fact that their "handler" explained that the students were in fact wrong and that it was an unmanned rocket carrying a dummy that was launched, he was convinced for the rest of his days that a cosmonaut was launched and lost that day.
There was actually a dummy launched around that time, I believe Simon even did a video on it a while ago
Heinlein claims it was in the morning papers. His wife had learned Russian for the trip. The afternoon papers talked about an unmanned launch. All the morning papers had been pulled. Did his wife make a mistake? Did the newspaper make a mistake? Or did someone become an unperson that day?
Side notes: "lika" means "barker" in russian and the soviets played down the fact that poor dog was destined to burn up in the atmosphere on return. Das vidanya, Lika!
Лайка.
I really wish we knew for sure if they sent up cosmonauts before Gagarin. If they did, those individuals deserve to have their names remembered -- they (willingly or unwillingly) sacrificed their lives for scientific understanding and advancement.
We're pretty sure, but it =DID= a decade or two, and the collapse of the USSR. No pre-Yuri flight fatalities.
News at the time of Yuri Gagarin’s death reported that he stayed in his aircraft and did not eject to avoid crashing in a populated area. Any info that this was actually true?
I think you’ve got your figures mixed up, I’m sure the Vostok rocket weighed more than 10,000 lb
According to Wiki the core plus stages added up to about 150,000 kilograms.
I've not seen evidence of lost cosmonauts but would be 0% surprised if someone came forward with it.
Here some names of death cosmonauts, bevor Gagarin's flight:
Alexej Ledowsky (1957)
Serenti Schaborin (1958)
Andrej Mitkow (1959)
Iwan Katschur (09/27/1960)
Piotr Dolgoff (10/11/1960)
Alexis Grassiow (December 1960)
Also, Vladimir Komarov (1967).
Simon, why did I have to find your channels mate lol, Ive been binging them all for days. Love it
Good video 👍
"It's coming for you too..." Hahaha. I'm even older than you Simon, so that boat sailed a quarter of a century ago. To be honest I wouldn't go back. I don't miss the hassle of hair washing and styling. So bon voyage gel, mouse and other hair products.
Gherman Titov, Pavel Popovich, and the head of the Russian space program came to our house in Bellevue Washington for Thanksgiving 1992. It was tied to the Space Flight Europe America 500 event where Russia sent a capsule into space containing messages of peace and cooperation, which would later land off the coast of Washington. We happened to know their translator, who we had invited to Thanksgiving. She called the day of, and asked if she could bring them along! Sure! They did not speak any English, but we managed to have a great time anyway. They all wanted their picture taken with the turkey, which was the biggest they had ever seen! They also drank copious amounts of vodka that night. Gherman managed to fall down our stairs on the way out the door, and unfortunately did not feel well enough to attend the opening of the capsule the next day at the Museum of Flight, where he was a guest of honor. It was a great experience, except for that last part! It was an honor to have been able to meet them. There was so much hope back then. It’s sad it has now fallen apart again.
Hey, it was 1992. A time when everything they have believed and dreamed about fell apart and was discarded. Can`t even imagine how hard would it be for them to participate in that event.
I was talking about this with a coworker of mine who escaped the Soviet Union in 1987. He maintained that Gagarin was probably not the first human in space, but the first one to come back… alive. The USSR maintained so much control over the media. To me it seems absolutely plausible.
Is there any evidence that the USSR had the amount of rockets and space vehicles to launch the flights reported to have been recorded by the two brothers prior to Gagarin?
Thanks for getting the ad out of the way at the beginning. I wish more Tubers would do that. 👍
Probably with the computing power of a calculator
Let's not forget all the amazing human calculators.
A calculator?....try an abacus....check the hand-wired "computer" in the Saturn 5.......pure miracles this tech worked!!!
if that.
lived at Woomera rocket launch site Australia as a child in early 60s loved the space race
Soviet people: We are fucking fighting for our lives with hunger
Soviet: Sends a Doggo to the space
Who was starving in the USSR in 1955? Any more of the population than in the US? Source please.
… that also died
Can't picture you with hair. The accent, the beard, the glasses.
Bro ... you got it all ~
I read a book written by a Russian astronaut. He said they Titov was better pilot than Gagarin and the second mission was more complicated that is why they scheduled Titov for the second mission. Then again everything the Russians say need to be questioned.
That lady Cosmonaut's recordings are very disturbing. The accounts I read about she didn't die in re-entry but was actually lost when she drifted away from earth and probably died a slow death when her oxygen ran out. She could be still out there in space somewhere. Her recordings (in Russian, of course) sound like she knew she was doomed.
Good thing it's pretty much unquestionably fake, huh?
She spoke in a very bad accent, not like a native Russian.
If she transmitted during reentry, not only would she be talking to no one (since Soviet reentries didn't happen in an area where capsules had radio contact with the ground), she wouldn't be able to reach that no one, because reentry plasma blocks radio signals - So the recording couldn't exist.
And, if one understands orbital mechanics, then one understands there is no "drifted off into space" for the same reason there's no such thing as a perpetual motion device - Once you're in orbit, you're in orbit, and unless you have propulsion or have atmospheric drag that slowly pulls you down, you're not going anywhere. You only have so much energy.
I wonder if a video about the beginnings of American space program would be riddled with as much skepticism as this one.
It's more that media in the USA had been more independant and the USA has less records of completely changing history itself to fit the narrative.
For example the famous photograph of stalin being edited to remove the dissident.
And given the fact that the media has ridiculed the early launches, i think vanguard as kaputnik after it crashed does show this relation.
@@MrPbhuh You’re writing that the US media are independent. My question is: What are they independent of? Are you trying to say that a newspaper journalist has a total freedom to promote any political or social views? Please explain.
@@jurekprzychodzen6454 free press is a line. The USSR had little to no free press vs the United States where there was at least a decent degree of it.
This can be seen by the fact that in the US you could critique things that were bad or wrong. You weren't just thrown in jail.
The red scare is definitely a darker point in US history regarding that, but the red scare is nothing compared to putting people in gulags.
Thus when we look back at history and we look at the claims of people,
Who is more credible,
A country in which no criticism is allowed and everything the state does is great, (sorta like what they wrote about the pharaohs)
Or
A country in which you get at least an idea of two sides to every tale and there is substantial criticism of bad things that do happen.
As much as it feels insulting, the USSR tainted the truth so much that conspiracies become harder to dispel.
I personally don't believe in the lost cosmonaut theory, but it wouldn't be the first time the USSR had just deleted people from history.
@@MrPbhuh
OMG!! Are you serious? The "independent" US Media have been known to blatantly LIE since the US Civil War.
"You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war" - US Media Magnate William R. Hearst 1898 to his journalist to fake stories about Spanish "crimes" in Cuba.
@@MrPbhuh I grew up in communist Poland and you don’t have to explain to me the nature of state controlled media. I was asking if the fact that media are privately owned is a guarantee that they will tell the truth. In my opinion, the answer is no. Who controls the money, controls the narrative. In reality, media tell the truth only if the truth supports their narrative, regardless of the fact wether it is state owned or privately owned. You probably remember when the independent media were peddling the fabricated story of Iraqi WMD’s.
The Russians were really pushing it on the creative naming convention: a satellite named "satellite" carrying a dog named "dog"!
Gawd dahmn!
Regarding the success rate of launches in the Soviet Union at that time (50's-odd percent, according to this video) we should note that the success rate of the Atlas was only 54% when it was selected for Project Mercury. Launch Escape Towers cover a multitude of sins!
Love all space content great job 👏👍
Brilliant - love the nuance and backstories, if a little tragic. Suspect the rocket was a bit heavier than 4,000+ kg (4 tonnes), mind!