Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

I'm normally very much a skeptic and not prone to conspiracy theories, but one that's always really fascinated me is the "lost cosmonauts" theory.

The idea that Yuri Gagarin wasn't the first human to travel into space, he was just the first human to return safely from space is haunting.

The concept that the USSR got ahead in the space race by a willingness to sacrifice a number of souls to the perils of space, and went to great lengths to cover it up, still seems plausible in my mind.

Putting humans into space is incredibly dangerous, and there are so many ways for a human to die in space. I've always felt there was a curious lack of death-in-space in the history of the early days of the space race, on both the Soviet and American sides.

Even though it is almost certainly warped by Cold War fear mongering, the idea that the Soviet Union shot capsules out of orbit, frequently had cosmonauts burn up on reentry etc just seems to fill in the gaps nicely.

Anyhow mostly conspiracy theory nuttiness, but I still believe there are nuggets of truth in there somewhere...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judica-Cordiglia_brothers

Some of these aren't conspiracy theories. The Soyuz 1 pilot knew he was going to die and, well, he did. The 1960 R-16 rocket explosion at the Baikonur Cosmodrome killed something like 200 ground crew. This was covered up for decades and only officially acknowledged as the USSR was beginning to fall apart in 1989.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe

I also believe the Polyus anti-satellite weapon platform intended to militarize space was a secret to the West until it failed to achieve orbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_%28spacecraft%29

Pretty much every space mission in the USSR was a secret. The West would detect a launch, or sometimes be told in advance a launch was happening to lower nuclear tensions, and then days later we'd see in Pravda what mission it was.

"Conspiracy theory" is IMHO an intellectually lazy term in that as normally used it promotes blanket dismissal of an entire category of thing based on prejudice. Conspiracies can and do happen. If that weren't the case, the FBI would not have a "conspiracy" division.

As always it boils down to Ockham's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually correct unless there is evidence otherwise.

Ockham's Razor in turn is probably a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Complex artifacts in space and time (like conspiracies) represent higher energy states of the universe and therefore are less likely to exist. When the probability of something being true is below the median, the burden of proof shifts to proving that it does exist. The further below the median, the higher the burden of proof. For example: it would require stronger unambiguous evidence to convince me Bigfoot exists or that the Roswell UFO crash happened than it would to convince me that there were cover-ups in the Soviet space program. The latter is not terribly unlikely given what we know of Soviet behavior.

We cannot rule this out, but it seems very unlikely to me. The more I read about it, the less likely it seems.

- Laika was launched aboard Sputnik 2 in October 1957

- Gagarin on Vostok 1 in April 1961

Sputnik 2 was much lighter than the Vostok capsule (500 kg vs. 2,500 kg) and did not feature any re-entry apparatus. In just 3.5 years, the Soviets had to improve their carrier rocket and develop a man-rated capsule with a heat-shield and braking system, a guidance system and had to improve the whole life-support system.

We know they launched dogs on the Vostok in Dec. 1960, so it is unlikely they'd launch a cosmonaut in the time before. So the time-span between the end of 1960 and April 1961 seems like the only time they could have lost cosmonauts. That just does not seem that much time and I have a hard time believing they managed to lose two cosmonauts in four months.

After the death of Komarov in April 1967, they took 1.5 years to fix their design till the launch of Soyuz 2. Likewise, they needed 2+ years after the Soyuz 11 tragedy to launch again. I don't believe they would have just launched a couple of cosmonauts nilly-willy after a deadly accident.

Wouldn't the absurdly short time period for design test iteration and the extreme political pressure weighing on success be the most ripe conditions for making sacrifices of this type though? We're talking about a generation that lived through WWII, Hitler and Stalin, where wartime values around dying for one's country were still viewed as a necessary and noble sacrifice. Seems like if there was ever a moment in history in which people would be willingly flung into space, knowing there was a high likelihood they would die, that would be it.

But what we know of their space program indicates that yes, they were cutting corners and reducing safety margins, they still used unmanned flights with dolls and animal flights. So, they were not willing to just shoot up a couple of guys and see who makes it down alive.

Heinlein is pretty sure such an event happened while he was traveling in the Soviet Union, which he relates in a chapter in Expanded Universe.

NOVA episode talked about first "secret" Soviet space station- mainly a cylinder for extending spy photography missions. A human in space was a more efficient photographer than a robot in the 1960s.

it's way beyond plausible. the proven willingness to sacrifice souls in ww2 basically proves it. the space race wasn't very long after the war. it was the same people running the show.

But, if it happened, the CIA must have known about it, the same way the knew about Komarov. So, why are American keeping quiet about it as well? Do we need to extend this conspiracy to the American side as well?

and blow the cover of the agents who got you the info?

Not then of course, now, after the documents from the era were declassified, and the agents in question are either dead or long retired.

Spy agencies are good but they're not omniscient. It's entirely possible that things happened that the CIA didn't know about, especially back before spy satellites were a common thing.

I personally like the conspiracy theory of a break-away civilization that we fund with black project money. I just hope it actually exists.

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