Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage' [in 1967]

It seems that NASA's been willing to accept a fair amount of it, given the tragedies that have bedeviled our space program.

NASA has been terrible on this. Not because of how much risk they're willing to accept, and not because they don't do the work to understand it. They always know what the probability of failure is. But, historically at least, they haven't been honest and forthright in taking to the public about it. In the early '80s, before the Challenger accident, they would say—and this is where I think they actually lied, I don't think that's too strong a word—they would say, "Flying the shuttle is like flying a 727 to Disney World."

That's absurd. Not only are you more likely to get killed in the shuttle than in an airplane; you're more likely to get killed going up once in the shuttle than if you had flown combat missions for two years in Vietnam. That's a statistical fact, but NASA doesn't make it clear. They might tell the House [of Representatives] that there's a 1.5 percent failure rate, but most Americans don't understand what that means. I mean, 1.5, what is that? Is that a lot? You have to relate it to something that means something to somebody. Otherwise, people have the perception that space flight is safe, and when there's an accident, they're shocked. It's like, "We gotta stop flying." If we want to add additional safeguards because now we're feeling emotional about it, okay, we can do that. But if we're still meeting our design specs for loss, why would we stop flying?

I like this approach.

the calm and proud voice repeats about Komarov making the way to Comminism for the whole mankind [edit: apparently Komarov himself in official radio appeal]. this is intersected with some voices that could not be understood.

the way to communism mantra is obviously copy-pasted several times, some times partially, just to make some russian soudns, like this: "Komarov prokladyvaet put k Kommunizmu!" - "phshphs-bla!-bla!" - "-mmunizmu!" - pshshsh!blabla! - "prokladyvaet put k Kommunizmu!"

imagine how Russians watch movies where Hollywood tries to show something Russian, labels or written names. mostly it is just a meaningless set of letters. this is also looks like a bullshit that some CIA guys presented to their local Brezhnevs to justify their work

There are rumors that Vladimir Ilyushin, son of the airplane designer Ilyushin, was actually the first person to survive a space flight, but something went wrong in the landing (some say he landed in China which caused a political controversy). Some even go as far as saying that Yuri Gagarin knew of this and was killed because he knew too much. Go and figure.

The truth will probably never be uncovered. If the soviets had archives of what really happened, they might be lost and/or destroyed.

Wikipedia is pretty good starting point if you want to read about this. Put David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on the background with repeat.

Then the Berlin wall fell and it ceased to be an important pursuit to conquer the stars.

I don't have a hard time believing that either the USSR or the USA would have hidden space deaths if they or we could in order to build a national mythology.

Columbus sent across the ocean on a wood rotten ship just to make it right on time to the celebration of 50 years of Revolut... err.. coronation. I guess, Columbia would have some another name and it would be some other, not 1492, year of America discovery.

That's not exploration, that's murder on one hand and self-sacrifice on the other.

  > This is on par with "Alien Autopsy" and 9/11 conspiracies.

  > That said, it invokes the "crazy Russikies" stereotype,
  > so it must be true.