Two Italian radio hackers vs. The Soviet Union's space program | Hacker News Reader

Two Italian radio hackers vs. The Soviet Union's space program

forteantimes.com

60 pointsjdub17 comments

For a skeptical view: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115 (Search for the Missing Cosmonauts)

"Am I saying Achille and Giovanni were hoaxers? Far from it. In fact, in researching their story, I gained tremendous respect for their abilities and for what they accomplished. [...] Unfortunately their story is too often told without critique or inquiry into the plausibility of their most extraordinary claims. There are simply too many other possible explanations for their recordings to comprise useful evidence of lost cosmonauts."

This story keeps resurfacing every year or so. It's bogus.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-real...

Yeah, the rest of it sounds pretty reasonable, but the SOS one is sort of impossible that early in the space race. To reach escape velocity they would have to build and launch a Delta-III like rocket. And then scale back the later launches to ICBM based rockets? Yeah right!

But, and this is highly unlikely (but I'm trying to remember from astrophysics class), if the spacecraft was going fast enough (but not necessarily escape velocity) and entered the atmosphere at a shallow angle it could skip across the surface of the atmosphere until it achieved enough speed to escape orbit.

But that is highly, highly unlikely. Unless Russian scientists were born with Jedi powers of astromechanics.

How would skipping across the atmosphere give you more energy than you started with?

Well, the crux of the article is about what the radio hackers actually did do, so that story isn't bogus. It does mention some of their claims, but points out that they're unverified.

I was intrigued enough to go to http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/wom.htm and download the Real Audio file of the alleged "first woman in space." It certainly doesn't sound like a communication of the astronaut, and it also sounds like it's doctored, like in the modern music, using the same sample more times from the pieces of some recording of the phone call talk. I'm curious if anybody who has enough experience with the sound analysis would be able to confirm the use of the same sample more than once.

Maybe it can be shown that the Italian brothers faked their proof of their most exorbitant claim the same way it can be shown that something is photoshopped. Then we can claim that what they did was that they were actually producing fakes.

There was an excellent presentation at the 26C3 last winter about these records:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/speakers/2755.e...

Unfortunatly, I can't find a link to the presentation record.

Here you go: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3710.en.h...

link does not work, but it seems there are lots of mirrors: http://mirror.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/pub/ccc/26C3/mp4/26...

comparatively to other exploratory endeavors of the human species, notably in particular - long distance naval explorations and developing of airplanes - the official history of space exploration has too few casualties and catastrophes. Such successful story looks especially suspiciously considering heavy political pressure and micro-management, at least in the Soviet Union space program. May be it is really not a rocket science to fly into space?

Btw, i really liked "Armageddon". In Russia it was politicized as an assault on the glorious Russian space history. I don't know or pretend to know much about it, yet the little i heard from the people involved in the program in '80-'90s perfectly matches "Armageddon" in spirit :)

Don't get me wrong though - the history of the space exploration is glorious, and there is no need to add to or withdraw from it.

It's a great read, but if it were true, why wouldn't the USA or one of its allies have released the same information? It would have been one hell of a propaganda coup!

That said, I can imagine a true conspiracy believer dismissing this with talk of the Illuminati or Bilderberg meetings... guess you just can't win!

Oh, that's easy: The USA didn't release the information, because they did not want the Soviets to retaliate by revealing that the Americans had never been on the moon.

(You can always rescue a conspiracy theory from the facts.)

I can always count on the Fortean Times to spark my imagination. The rational mind needs regular holidays in the land of the weird.

Just a fantastic read. I am amazed that they were able to build all this stuff by hand whereas millions was spent by US and Russians for similar setups. Also, I couldn't imagine being watched by the KGB back in the day. It must have been no fun to walk around at night.

A much more worthwhile, and factually based, read: http://www.jamesoberg.com/usd10.html

I have a lot of respect for James Oberg, his posts in the various Usenet space-related groups are great:

http://yarchive.net/space/

This is very interesting story. Thanks for posting this OP!

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