Lost in Space...

[frostytheplebe]

Lately (for some unknown reason) I've been doing research into the Russian Space program. Mostly to solve my own curiosity about whether or not anyone was ever actually "Lost in Space."

Now technically some count the tragedy of the Columbia as Astronauts being lost in space, but I do not. Their shuttle broke up on re-entry, and some of it was recovered.

A second name came up when I was doing research "Soyuz 11." (Image 2) When i first heard this name, I thought to myself, "This must be the answer I've been looking for. I'd heard rumors that the Russians had lost people in orbit, but nothing had been confirmed. As it turns out, Soyuz 11 was another re-entry disaster where the three crew members "Life support" malfunctioned on re-entry and they suffocated. Again, tragic, but not what I was looking for.

I've found a lot of other examples as well and here is the data that I have compiled over the last few days (mostly due to lack of anything better to do.) While the US list was readily available and easy to find. I knew I would have significantly more problems with the Russian side of things... sure enough...



The confirmed Facts for United States:

Cited From the Space Mirror Memorial:

Theodore Freeman, one of the "Astronaut Group 3" recruits from 1963, died in a T-38 training accident on October 31, 1964.

Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were in the Apollo 1 capsule for plugs-out test on January 27, 1967 when a short circuit ignited flammable materials in the pressurized pure-oxygen atmosphere. (Tragic, but this ship never made it off the ground.)
Clifton Williams died in a T-38 training crash on October 5, 1967. (Crash landing, not in space)

Michael J. Adams died in an X-15 crash on November 15, 1967. (X-15 is the image on my desktop, that thing as far as I'm concerned is the closest thing we have to a modern star fighter. Still, suborbital, and not in space.)

Robert H. Lawrence, Jr. died on December 8, 1967, when the F-104 he was testing crashed and his ejection seat parachute failed to open. (Wasn't able to get too much on this one, but I believe this to be a suborbital flight... either way, he died in crash, not in space.)

January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff. (High Atmosphere, Not in space...)

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry. (In Atmosphere, not in space).




Confirmed Soviet Disasters :
Cited from
Uncovering Soviet Disasters
James Oberg
V

September 1960, cosmonaut Pyotr Dolgov was killed when his rocket blew up on the launchpad. (Not in space)

1961: Grigoriy Nelyubov and two others were removed from the cosmonaut corps. Their space careers were aborted; they went back to flying jets in Siberia. Due to a drunken bar fight... (why this made it in anywhere is beyond me... Clearly not lost in space.)

March 23, 1961: Valentin Bondarenko:While undergoing pressure training, he cleaned the health sensors attached to his chest with a cotton swab, threw the swab on to electrical wires, they ignited and torched the pressure chamber, killing him in seconds. (Not in space... though the picture (Image 1) was pretty gruesome.)

April 1961 Russian pilot Vladimir Ilyushin circled the earth three times but was badly injured on his return. (Survival, not in space)



And the Unconfirmed Rumors (Various sources):

Cosmonaut Ledovsky was killed in 1957 on a suborbital space hop from the Kapustin Yar rocket base on the Volga River. (Suborbital, not in space)

A year later, another Cosmonaut, Shiborin, died the same way.

Cosmonaut Mitkov same thing, 1959. (They really needed to try something else.)

Unnamed cosmonaut... May 1960, Lost in Space when his orbiting space capsule headed out in the wrong direction. (BINGO!)

May 1961 an SOS was detected in Europe, evidently from an orbiting spacecraft with two cosmonauts aboard. (No other information found.)

February 4, 1961, a mystery Soviet satellite was heard to be transmitting heartbeats, which soon stopped... (I found more information citing that there was a two man capsule rumored lost early that same year. Same one?)

On October 14, 1961, a multiman Soviet spacecraft was knocked off course by a solar flare and vanished into deep space . (only one source could be found on this one, no other info available... so I'm taking it at face value.)


Cited from:
April 1965, Reader's Digest...


February 4, 1961, a mystery Soviet satellite was heard to be transmitting heartbeats, which soon stopped... (I found more information citing that there was a two man capsule rumored lost early that same year. Same one?)

November 1962, and some believe that a cosmonaut named Belokonev in orbit at this time. (... sadly theres not a lot more info on this one...)

According to Reader's Digest, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia and their team of 15 space enthusiasts constructed a very impressive space listening post with a 40-foot octagonal dish. They began picking up Russian space transmissions early in 1960. Then on November 28, 1960, a spacecraft supposedly radioed three times, in Morse code and in English, "SOS to the entire world." A few days later the Russians admitted a failed launch on December 1 but said nothing about anyone on board. (I could not find any information as to whether or not the Soviets admitted that the loss took place in orbit or not... thus this incident will stay under the rumor section)

Then again the Italian group picked up a transmission on May 17, 1961, two men and a woman were overheard saying, in Russian, "Conditions growing worse; why don't you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us."
(This sent chills down my spine. I only wish I could confirm this.)

Wiki citing...
Following the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 which killed three American astronauts, U.S. intelligence sources reportedly described five fatal Soviet spaceflights and six fatal ground accidents .





Finale:

Okay I understand the need for keeping everything classified back during the Cold War. But if Cosmonauts were truly lost in space, and presumably still orbiting the Earth. Why would they keep it secret now? The world already knows what a disaster the Soviet Space program was, is there really anything to be preserved by keep secret the names and stories of brave men and women who perished in the service of their country? Or even better, a nice multi-nation mission of good will to attempt a recovery of the bodies of any that might still be up there and return them to their families for burial.

Anyway, I thought everyone might be interested in the research I've done. Please feel free to let me know if I've missed any or there are any other stories you may know, I'd definitely be interested in adding them into my file.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

What you've collected here are a lot of long-discredited Cold War rumors. These were rampant in the 1960s, spread by both the American desire to explain why NASA was 'behind' the Russians and the Soviet state's inherent secrecy (not publicly reporting launches until they'd happened and so forth). I will point out specifics in a moment, but to be clear: there are no dead Cosmonauts orbiting the Earth.

There are several seemingly obvious reasons for this. One is that there's nothing secure about Earth orbit - both the United States, the third world and every amateur astronomer in between knows *when* something is put into orbit (and what size it is). Similarly, every radio operator--from those employed by the CIA to ordinary hams--had the ability to monitor space-related communications (and boy, did they). If a mission failed in orbit, it would have been public knowledge even if not stated by the American government (and revealing proof of a Soviet space catastrophe would have been a 'win' for a desparately behind United States in the 1960s -- so the fact that claims of evidence are only made by fringe kooks should be somewhat telling). Remember, the political goal of the space program, the reason it was so well supported, was to prove to the non-aligned nations that each country's system of government was the best for advancing science... space disasters were capitalized on *when they actually happened*.

Then there's the fact that the Soviets *did* acknowledge their two space disasters (Soyuz 1 and 11) as well as a variety of training and ground incidents. Contrary to popular 'feel', communications between the superpowers were commonplace; we think of the Iron Curtain as being something through which nothing traveled, but it isn't true... especially in terms of peaceful space exploration. It was not uncommon for either side to inform that a manned mission was going up, to avoid potential communications issues. Astronauts and cosmonauts would even meet in those years, on publicity tours in Third World countries or at the Paris Air Show or attending each other's funerals.

Lastly, there's another very good reason these claims died out in the early 1990s... because when the Soviet Union fell, the entire collection of their secret archives became first openly available and still today are available to anyone for a price. Historians learned a heck of a lot about their moon programme and Buran and what-not... but nothing about dead cosmonauts (an even-more-final reason for a lack of corpses in space today is purely physical; space isn't a corkboard... you have to do a lot of work and planning to specifically *keep* something in orbit. Any fowled launch or crew that died in orbit would have re-entered a long time ago.)

(Note that serious historians threw out the idea that there were failed missions that killed their crews by the 1970s, leaving only the possibility that more people had died in training accidents or pad failures than were already known. Even that possibility has diminished to pretty much nothing today, with a vast quantity of Soviet archives available.)

The confirmed Facts for United States:

The question is a lot more complex than it sounds. Technically, NASA has lost two crews during their missions - Challenger and Columbia. We generally add the Apollo 1/AS-204 to this list even though the fire occured during a test.

Then you have a whole host of people who died during training/preparation.

You mentioned Ted Freeman, who died in a T-38 crash; add to that list Charlie Bassett and Elliot See (Group 3 and 2, respectively) who were killed together in another T-38 crash while preparing for their Gemini 9 flight... and CC Williams, another T-38 victim.

... and then you have a good number of astronauts who died during his training but not as a result of any official NASA business. Ed Givens, Group 5, in a car accident is the famous example... but a number of shuttle astronauts died in plane crashes and the like.

(And finally, there were a great many astronauts who died years later... )

Michael J. Adams died in an X-15 crash on November 15, 1967. (X-15 is the image on my desktop, that thing as far as I'm concerned is the closest thing we have to a modern star fighter. Still, suborbital, and not in space.)

Suborbital isn't the same thing as not in space. The X-15 flew 'in space' on occasion, by anyone's definition (50 miles according to the military, 100 kilometers).. *but*: X-15 pilots were test pilots, not astronauts. Several (who reached 50+ miles during tests) earned astronaut wings and several went on to join NASA (including Neil Armstrong). Adding more to your confusion, Major Adams *was* an astronaut already, in that he had been recruited and trained for the USAF's aborted Manned Orbiting Laboratory program... before going on to test the X-15 and actually earning USAF astronaut wings for flying briefly in space. He was never a NASA astronaut, though.

(The real Frosty and I just went to a lecture given by Joe Engle about the X-15 -- when you hit the top of your arc you were in space, seeing the curvature of the Earth and maneuvering with thrusters)

Robert H. Lawrence, Jr. died on December 8, 1967, when the F-104 he was testing crashed and his ejection seat parachute failed to open. (Wasn't able to get too much on this one, but I believe this to be a suborbital flight... either way, he died in crash, not in space.)

Robert Lawrence was a USAF astronaut, part of the aforementioned MOL project. When that was cancelled he went back to the Air Force, where he died in an F-104 accident. Despite the name, the F-104 was an ordinary fighter and had nothing to do with spaceflight... and so his death has nothing to do with spaceflight, other than that he had previously trained as a military astronaut.

September 1960, cosmonaut Pyotr Dolgov was killed when his rocket blew up on the launchpad. (Not in space)

This is not true. Colonel Dolgov was an air force test pilot who died in a high altitude parachute test (these were a big deal in the early 1960s).

March 23, 1961: Valentin Bondarenko:While undergoing pressure training, he cleaned the health sensors attached to his chest with a cotton swab, threw the swab on to electrical wires, they ignited and torched the pressure chamber, killing him in seconds. (Not in space... though the picture (Image 1) was pretty gruesome.)

The picture (which I'm removing because it's disrespectful and creepy) is Colonel Komarov's body, recovered from the Soyuz 1 crash site. The rest of this is accurate.

April 1961 Russian pilot Vladimir Ilyushin circled the earth three times but was badly injured on his return. (Survival, not in space)

This was a commonly repeated story years ago which has since been fairly well debunked. Ilyushin was never a cosmonaut.

Cosmonaut Ledovsky was killed in 1957 on a suborbital space hop from the Kapustin Yar rocket base on the Volga River. (Suborbital, not in space)

A year later, another Cosmonaut, Shiborin, died the same way.

Cosmonaut Mitkov same thing, 1959. (They really needed to try something else.)

I think there's a fourth one on this particular conspiracy theory list, which has since been disproven with actual Soviet records (but they're certainly the most likely candidates for *possible* dead cosmonauts, since Russia could theoretically have covered up a failed suboribital test in the 1950s... but simple things like information on spacecraft and rocket production proves that it didn't happen; this applies to all the others I didn't quote below).

Unnamed cosmonaut... May 1960, Lost in Space when his orbiting space capsule headed out in the wrong direction. (BINGO!)

Actual space doesn't work the way it does in Wing Commander. A spacecraft in orbit (especially in 1960...) doesn't have the remaining fuel (or the thrust in the first place) to simply jet away. The Space Shuttle today can't even change into another orbit; to put men out of LEO in the 1960s we had to develop the largest rocket ever built (far larger than anything Russia had in May 1960)... it's not just something that happens as a funny accident.

May 1961 an SOS was detected in Europe, evidently from an orbiting spacecraft with two cosmonauts aboard. (No other information found.)

That's a romantic notion, but it's clearly not true on concept alone. Who would a spacecraft crew be sending an SOS to? Mission control knows what their status is... and the crew knows no one can rescue them (and that their only hope for coming up with a solution is talking to the people they're already in constant communications with).

On October 14, 1961, a multiman Soviet spacecraft was knocked off course by a solar flare and vanished into deep space . (only one source could be found on this one, no other info available... so I'm taking it at face value.)

This isn't how "solar flares" work, either. Or "courses". Once you put a spacecraft in orbit, it travels around until it comes back down as planned. There's no magic force that can push it somewhere else.

Following the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 which killed three American astronauts, U.S. intelligence sources reportedly described five fatal Soviet spaceflights and six fatal ground accidents .

I did my senior history project on the Johnson administration's space policy working with the LBJ library's collections (including, specifically, the White House's reaction to the fire); if the CIA had secret knowledge about Soviet space deaths, they certainly didn't share it with the *President of the United States*.

(More surprisingly, you left off the one that actually happened: cosmonauts Volkov, Dobrovolski and Patsayev died during Soyuz 11's re-entry.)

Anyway... these old death reports are interesting to think about, but you'll ultimately find it's almost entirely Cold War sensationalism. There's a lot more to space history that *actually happened* that's even more interesting...

 

[Aginor]

Originally I wanted to post a reply with some more content, but then I saw LOAF had actually done what I wanted to do.

So I'm just saying:
I also did some research about that some years ago, and LOAF is (at least as far as I can see) right in all his points.

It is an interesting question, but rather simple to answer, because space is above us all. We can see it, we can "scan" it, and we can receive everything from there, no matter who sent it or to whom. The rest of the theories content can be proven (wrong) by physics.
I think we know almost everything about the space programs, especially of those during the Cold War.

 

[frostytheplebe]

(More surprisingly, you left off the one that actually happened: cosmonauts Volkov, Dobrovolski and Patsayev died during Soyuz 11's re-entry.)

I actually did have that in there, but it was accidentally deleted out when I was rewriting it. Thats my mistake, actually one of the pictures down the bottom is the rescuers trying to save them.