Question by : Are there dead Russian Cosmonauts on the Moon?
I’ve been trying to look into whether they are “lost cosmonauts” in space. I think that maybe before we landed on the moon, the Russians just started launching people up there just to try to beat us. There was multiple Russian rocket/ spacecraft crashes/ failures around that time?
Also, the “first” man in space was Yuri Gagarin, but is he the first person to survive space?
Also, Could there be lost chinese astronaughts?
Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel,
Answers and Views:
Answer by Jib
The answer to all of those questions is yes. There is also dead mice monkeys and cats.
Read all the answers in the comments.
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Barry says
No. In the same way as the USSR (mostly Russians) monitored the Apollo launches, tracking and triangulationg their position in the sky, from bases and ships thousands of miles apart, to get a longer baseline reading, to ensure no false claims were made, the US did the same with the Soviets.
The US would have known, and would have used it to discredit Soviet science and technology.
Once Perestroika (openness) became Soviet policy, under Gorbachev, many secrets were revealed, including how the USSR made their highly advanced lunar robots, some of which the US later adopted for its Mars rovers.
Although they had plans for a manned moon landing, those plans were shelved after the successes of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, & 17, due to problems with building a big enough rocket. No prizes for being second, so why bother spending many millions of Roubles on it?
Robert says
I doubt the USSR would have release any information regarding dead cosmonauts on the Moon- just as the US wouldn’t release any information regarding the Apollo 18 astronauts. It would be politically embarrassing to release such information.
Scott Stevenson says
No, no “lost cosmonauts”. They’ve had deaths during their program (as has the US) but neither country has ever left anybody “up there”.
The “multiple Russian rocket failures” were their “moon rocket”, the N1. It never flew a manned mission.
By that time, we had built up quite a lead in really big rocket engines, so instead of five huge engines like on the Saturn V, the N1 used _30_ smaller engines. The Soviet engineers were very good, but when you start having 30 engines (all of which interact with each other) it gets to be such a complicated thing that nobody can figure it out.
The N1 was test launched several times. Every time, the rocket rose from the pad, began to climb into the sky, and then the following things quickly happened.
1) there was a bright flash of light
2) there was an enormous “boom”
3) pieces of the rocket rained down onto the launch site
Nobody ever rode the thing. Astronauts (at least back then) were all test pilots, and you don’t get to that point in your test pilot career if you have a death wish.
The Chinese have only launched a few manned flights–no deaths.
SpartanCanuck says
I see. So, you’re under the impression that a rocket launch can take place in secret, eh? Particularly given how intently the major powers watch each other for potential ICBM launches, and monitored each other’s programs during the Cold War?
Yeah. That would be quite a feat. It’s hard to miss something like this:
http://youtu.be/3DVYdqrkE2w
And it’s awfully hard to get to the Moon in something that flies like this:
http://youtu.be/zjy6gTYqb3s
Meanwhile the Apollo missions were thoroughly evident. Their telemetry and radio chatter was listened in upon by everyone from the Soviets to ham radio operators. They were also observed via optical telescopes on their outbound and inbound legs. How would the Soviets fly a Moon mission without telemetry or radio chatter?
Paula says
Yes there is a Chinese there.
Well it is believed so.
In about 146 BC (in our years), a Chinese experimenter wondered about space flight.
He got a sturdy chair and sat in it.
Beneath it he had attached about 450 sky rockets.
He lit the blue touch paper and dissapeared skywards, never to be seen again.
It is assumed he would be on the moon.
Lodar of the Hill People says
Russia was never able to send someone to the moon, dead or otherwise.
always b natural says
l would say no. There are now very powerful satellites
that can see distinct things on the moon, and in space,
as well as all the mapping going on out there. The
space agencies pretty well know everything that is out
there. Hey, they can even predict when a space debris
is going to be drawn into orbit and crash
*Pirate* says
Perhaps, it would be hard to tell unless you went up there and searched for them yourself. It would be highly unlikely that these men have survived for very long if they did become lost, of course. Yuri Gagrin died in a Jet crash near Kirzhach, so he is not in space.