First Man To Walk In Space Reveals How Mission Nearly Ended In Disaster 122
wired_parrot writes Nearly fifty years after the first spacewalk by soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, he's given a rare interview to the BBC revealing how the mission very nearly ended in disaster. Minutes after he stepped into space, Leonov realised his suit had inflated like a balloon, preventing him from getting back inside. Later on, the cosmonauts narrowly avoided being obliterated in a huge fireball when oxygen levels soared inside the craft. And on the way back to Earth, the crew was exposed to enormous G-forces, landing hundreds of kilometres off target in a remote corner of Siberia populated by wolves and bears.
Mars one? (Score:1)
Re:Mars one? (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt that Mars One colonists will need to deal with wolves and bears after landing.
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Though it would be interesting to see how long a Bear would take to open a CCCP'd space capsule.
I bet these bears [dailymail.co.uk] would be quite adept and preconditioned to try it.
Re:Mars one? (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt that Mars One colonists will have to deal much with anything, by the way. My guess is that the people behind the venture have no plans to actually launch a single vehicle, but have a whole range of reality shows planned for "selecting" the "astronauts". They're probably just waiting for a network to pick them up, or for Endemol to buy the concept.
*) for some definitions of "great"
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Wolves and Bears? (Score:4, Funny)
I always thought landing in an area surrounded by wolves and bears was part of the typical mission plan for Russian cosmonauts
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In most areas of Russia that actually have wolves and bears, there are no grocery stores.
OTOH, the areas that do have grocery stores, are awfully short on wolves and bears. And most other wildlife, actually. When I lived in Russia, I never saw a squirrel outside of pictures in books. The first time I saw a live one was in Canada.
Still better off than Laika. (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Neat interview (Score:5, Insightful)
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Glove story was from Gemini 4. In one of the videos you can watch the glove float out the open hatch into the void.
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How does one take off a glove in space and not violently decompress?
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Only revealing thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is how when I first read about this back in the late '80s it was not "wolves and bears".
It was A wolf, reported by the rescuers as "going in their direction".
To which the cosmonauts, knowing what they've just been through, laughed.
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It was A wolf, reported by the rescuers as "going in their direction".
To which the cosmonauts, knowing what they've just been through, laughed.
It would be kind of like asking an astronaut "But weren't you afraid of drowning when your pod splashed down?" ;-)
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One of them almost did drown, so it's a valid concern.
Gus Grissom (Score:4, Interesting)
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Valid, but trivial in comparison to being incinerated during the reentry.
Or being smashed to paste cause the chute didn't open.
Or bouncing off of the atmosphere into space cause the angle was wrong.
Or one of the millions of other things that could have potentially gone wrong, many of which DID go wrong in the past.
Drowning?
Hell, at least you made it back to Earth in one piece and it is trivial to do something about it compared to having your air sucked out in space cause you ran into a screw someone left up
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Point three is, depending on orbit and resources still on board, quite survivable. Since that means you're technically aerobraking, you'd lower your apogee, and next time you circle around our planet, you'd again re-enter the atmosphere, repeat that x times until your apogee lowers to well inside the atmosphere.
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Very close to that.
Except they came extra prepared. [world.guns.ru]
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It's funny, when I was a kid, I had seen so many scifi movies, games, books, etc. where the characters who crash-landed or got attacked by aliens always seemed to have weapons on board. So I just assumed that every NASA or Soviet space capsule had weapons on board. I guess I was at least partially right. I wonder if any of NASA's splash-down pods had emergency fishing poles. ;-)
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Hell, Leonov discussed it himself in the book he co-wrote with Dave Scott, Two Sides of the Moon [amazon.com].
The Russian space program was amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
If you see the Russian spacecraft, it's amazing how determined they were to compete, relatively successfully with the US space program, despite the fact that their manufacturing capabilities were not really up to the task. But they used whatever they had, and pushed hard. So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination. It was particularly striking with how they got a third astronaut into their two-man ship, so they matched Apollo, by taking the third man and jamming him in upside down. They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight, so he had the incentive to actually make it work. And their venus probes - those guys just didn't give up! But definitely playing by different rules than the US - after a vehicle failure, and we shut everything down and analyzed to make it safer. With the Russians, a vehicle failure meant re-writing the history books (to remove the failed flight, erase astronauts from photos, etc.) and launching _more_.
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It was also standard practice after the Apollo 1 accident. The problem with Apollo 1 was that they filled it with oxygen at sea-level pressure, not the pressure normally used in space.
Re:The Russian space program was amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
The Russians had the genius Korolev [wikipedia.org] all we Americans had was an old Nazi who no one even listened to until the Russians were already way ahead of us.
Re:The Russian space program was amazing (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think Robert Goddard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard [wikipedia.org] was a Nazi.
I know that Robert Goddard's time came before the "Space Race". I just want to make the point that we Americans didn't just have our prize from WWII, Wernher von Braun to inform us about rocketry.
In the interests of full disclosure, I was born and raised in Massachusetts, which may explain my more immediate familiarity with Robert Goddard.
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I don't think he was an enthusiastic/ideological Nazi. He was just unfortunate to have been enmeshed in the German industrial hierarchy when he was recruited to work on their missile program.
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I don't think he was an enthusiastic/ideological Nazi. He was just unfortunate to have been enmeshed in the German industrial hierarchy when he was recruited to work on their missile program.
Yeah, him and every other German. There were , of course, only ever a few TRUE Nazis (Hitler, Goebbels, a handful of others, definitely not anyone's grandfather).
Everyone else just joined for the cool uniforms and healthy camping, and had absolutely no idea what was going on with all that "rounding up the Jews" and "invading Poland" stuff.
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Of course, if we're going to the times before the actual Space Race, then Soviets similarly had Tsiolkovsky.
Re:The Russian space program was amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Your comment seems very condescending.
Let's not forget the Russians were the first to send a satellite around the Earth, the first to send an animal into space, the first to send a man into space, the first to send a woman into space, the first to have a space mission that lasted more than a day, the first to have a spacewalk, the fist to send a satellite to orbit the Moon, the first to have fully automated rendez-vous between two satellites, etc., etc., etc.
Sure, their spacecraft may look "ugly" (or at least, "uglier") than western or American ones, but they get the job done and they are reliable workhorses.
I believe the differences between the two is mostly to the "no nonsense" approach to the Russians, and the fact that they like re-using designs and equipment that work instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel.
Think about it this way: the USA created the space shuttle and sank billions of dollars into it. The Russians kept improving the Soyuz rockets and capsules. These days, the space shuttle has been retired, while both Soyuz still fly regularly. Which approach is better? I don't know, but you certainly can't blame the Russians for creating "ugly" machines, as long as they are functional and good at what they do.
Recommended viewing: "The Red Stuff" about the very first Cosmonaut class of the USSR. You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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"Think about it this way: the USA created the space shuttle and sank billions of dollars into it. The Russians kept improving the Soyuz rockets and capsules."
Hummm
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)"
They spent billions trying to copy the space shuttle.
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The coping part is pretty well documented.
Re:The Russian space program was amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they did, but they didn't abandon their existing, working infrastructure to do so. That is the difference.
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True. I never said that it was not a huge mistake to stop the Saturn V production line, not developing a new Saturn 1 class rocket with maybe a single F1 for the first stage, and or stopping the production and development of the Apollo CSM.
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Best outcome would have been the CSM on top of continually developed rockets, with a hab module available for longer term Shuttle style missions - there is no reason Hubble could not be serviced by an Apollo style CSM and hab module.
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Actually the Apollo could have worked fine for that. A small hab module around the size of the LM and an improved Saturn 1 with a single F1A or F1B and SRBs could have reached the Hubble.
The Shuttle is frankly a really flexible system but it would have been good if we had kept the Saturns and Apollos for some missions. Face it the Saturn V was the original HLLV.
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Don't forget, Soviet Russian was the first to send a manned mission outside our solar system.
It was a one-way flight by mistake; the guy screamed until he ran out of air, but, hey, it's gotta count for something.
A USA Naval aviator told me that the Soviet Russians did only what was necessary in flight--titantium on the leading edges and not entire wings; rivets unleveled where it didn't matter instead of everywhere like the USA. The Soviets Russians didn't economize; it's that they didn't have to put on a
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i've got evidence the other way , voyager one was the first man made object to leave the solar system
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie... [bbc.co.uk]
maybe the poster was watching a russian translation of 2001
Lost in Space (Score:2)
To squelch the rumors, the story told is that the Soviets then played tapes of vocal choruses. No one would believe that they orbited the entire Soviet Army Men's Choral Group . . .
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Don't forget, Soviet Russian was the first to send a manned mission outside our solar system.
It was a one-way flight by mistake; the guy screamed until he ran out of air, but, hey, it's gotta count for something.
I can't find reference to this. Link?
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Apparently they tconcluded that Soyuz is better
What a fantasy. All that happened was bad timing, they've run out of money everywhere all at once. Buran had a few quite nifty advances in its manufacturing tech over the way the american shuttles were made. They built a 3D CAD system to design the thing, for crying out loud.
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Also, by outsourcing space exploration, congress can outsource failures and liability.
When a private spacecraft kills someone, congress can shutter the company responsible
without taking any responsibility itself.
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The SOVIETS, not the Russians. The Soviet Union conquered many different ethnic groups for their empire, and the Russians were only one of them.
I think a lot of people forget that Russia was just the first nation to fall to the Soviets. Just like Germany was the first nation to fall to the Nazis.
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Except... they don't re-use designs and equipment. The current mark of the Soyuz (capsule) has almost nothing in common with the early ones other than a reasonably similar moldline. Soyuz has been modified and updated multiple times, not the least as it evolved from a general purpose Earth orbit
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They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight
Guess someone learned their lesson about not opening their big mouth... On the other hand, being crammed upside down into a tiny capsule atop a pile of combustible fuel contained by experimental Soviet equipment might still be worth it for a once in a lifetime chance at going to space.
Not the time to put them down for inferiority (Score:2)
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Trying the "master race" shit without even a horse in the race
Wait, what? I don't even?
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Is "horse" the master race or not? I'm still trying to sort this one out ...
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Putting people into low earth orbit isn't really something all that impressive or useful - it's just for propaganda.
It's much more impressive to go the route of the Americans and Europeans and actually explore the solar system.
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Not really. Could you list out some?
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Re:The Russian space program was amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
If you see the Russian spacecraft, it's amazing how determined they were to compete, relatively successfully with the US space program,
James Harford in the 1997 book "Korolev" he interviewed several of Sergei Korolev colleages and one of them said when Kennedy announced the race to the Moon, the Soviets can either get in the race or not. They did neither. There were those in Politburo very interested in manned spaceflight, others that were not ("stop wasting resources with man in space which is only good for propaganda instead of actual military hardware). When Khrushchev was ":sent to Siberia" Korolev lost much support. He was able to proceed with Soyuz, N1 (he was also chief of many other programs) but their space program was not given all resources. So there was not enough resources for development and ground tests, N1 never had successful launch, Soyuz had it's growing pains and its first manned flight was a fatality.
I wonder if our space program is experiencing this "we're doing neither." No shortcuts are being taken in SLS and Orion development but there is no significant funding for landers and habitat modules. And where is US going? Moon, Mars, or an asteroid? Depends on who you talk to.
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...and the apocryphal story is about as accurate as one expects for apocryphal stories. http://www.snopes.com/business... [snopes.com]
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So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination.
And it's interesting that the reason for this was a lack of nuclear weapons sophistication. Making a hydrogen bomb required hydrogen (isotopes) as fuel. But how to store it? The first idea was using liquid hydrogen, but then you need a railway car full of cryogenic equipment to keep it liquid. That's the design parameters the Soviets used for their ICMBs, i.e. we need to be able to shoot a railway cart to the US. Teller and co. then realised that by using lithium in the Teller-Ulam design you could make the
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You could argue that after a vehicle failure (STS/Challenger); we didn't shut everything down and analyze it to make it safer. If we had, we would have thrown out the ATK-booster and side-tank design, and built a new shuttle. Instead, we kept shovelling pork at ATK, and fired the program up again months later. It wasn't the same defect that destroyed Columbia, but it was the same design mentality: #1 priority was appease congress by sending their districts pork, no matter how technically irrelevant the
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Comparing the records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#Astronaut_fatalities_during_spaceflight ) the US and Russian/USSR space programs have fairly similar safety percentages - "About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates."
The main difference that I see is that the US has launched many more launches, and many more astronauts, and in particular the two
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The biggest difference between the Russians and Americans was definitely safety. It's amazing how far you can go once human life becomes expendable.
But the Russians killed a bunch of astronauts in the early years, too.
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Pissing on the spacecraft before launch was a Russian tradition (no joke). I would laugh at this, but it seemed to work out pretty well for them.
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Yeah, that's a tradition that started with Yuri Gagarin and has been done before every Soviet and Russian space flight since.
Mr. Gagarin relieved himself on the tire (Score:2)
Commander Shepard, I guess, was bolted into the rocket for so long he had to "do it in the suit."
really? A fireball? (Score:1)
It was really close but luckily they realized Oxygen isn't flammable and requires other flammable materials to burn. Boy, that was a close one!
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Other things become flammable in high oxygen environments, such as most metals and materials that any space craft would be built from.
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A lot of things are flammable in pure oxygen.
A few astronauts would have been able to testify, had they been alive... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org] )
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"they realized Oxygen isn't flammable and requires other flammable materials to burn"
I went back and re-read the article just to make sure and, yep, sure enough, it appears that they weren't in a pure oxygen environment, but rather were actually inside a spaceship made from various and sundry materials, most of which are sufficient fuel when surrounded by high-content oxygen gas.
The fuel is the spaceship and its contents: knobs, buttons, seat covers, clothes, hair, flesh, tools.
Reakl reason he had trouble getting back in. (Score:2)
Soviet or US, those space pioneers deserve a lot of credit for taking those risks.
Why? (Score:2)
"Not because it is easy, but because it is hard!"
Eaten by a bear (Score:2)
You survive a spacewalk, an inflated suit, too much G-force, and everything dangerous that can happen in space, then after you land you get eaten by a bear. How ironic.
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Not sure if badass or crazy...
But then, Americans put bear in escape capsule [wikipedia.org]....
Maybe wait for the arrival of the first Antariksha yaatri before attempting to engage in interplanetary space piracy.
Leonov was in Milpitas! (Score:2)