Did You Know? The Russian Version

The Russian space program is filled with amazing and startling events. Because of more than 30 years of secrecy under the Iron Curtain, many have laid relatively unknown.

Crazy? During a party in Cuba in 1967, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova announced that the Soviet’s were indeed going to the moon and that Gagarin was going to be the commander for the first mission. She also claimed that she too was going to be on the crew. This was thought to be odd, because she wasn't even training for the mission. At the time, many viewed this as a hint to mental instability or wild uninformed boasting. Rumors about her mental health first surfaced during her Vostok 6 flight when she allegedly exhibited strange behavior.

Used Vostok for sale. The Russian Photon class probe, used in the 1980’s for remote sensing and Earth photography, was really just a modified 1960’s vintage Vostok capsule used for the first Russian manned flights.

Another first. Pavel Belayev, who flew along with Alexei Leonov during Vostok 2 in 1965, was the first cosmonaut/astronaut to die of natural causes. After a deadly and protracted stomach illness, he died in January 1970.

Unbelievable. Unbeknownst to the Western world until the 1980’s, a cosmonaut died in 1961 in a way similar in the way the Apollo 1 crew perished six years later. Valentin Bondarenko was burned to death when a fire started in a pure oxygen sphere used to simulate a spacecraft while in space.

Something to say? Cosmonauts, by tradition, must make a speech before there blast off.

Too bad. Unknown to most, the Soviets built a Space Shuttle of their own during the 1980’s. Named Buran, it was smaller than the American version, and had space for only a four-man crew. It was launched in 1988, during an unmanned test flight and landed at a Russian landing strip by remote control. Many cosmonauts favored a manned first test flight just as the Americans had done in 1981. Unfortunately, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, there was no longer any funding available for the project.

Blackout. Only two countries in the world did not broadcast Armstrong’s historic first step on the moon, China and the former Soviet Union. What is this? During a television broadcast in April of 1994, Cosmonauts aboard the MIR space station displayed a few pieces of hardware they had found onboard and could not identify. After several days of research, engineers on the ground could find no manual about the hardware or any engineer who could identify it. In the end, mission control suggested to the cosmonauts that they keep the objects onboard in case their purpose should ever arise.

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