Will it get the job done, on time, and even if lots of things go wrong?

April 15, 2016 2:46 AM

Gagarin was an incredibly lucky man to have come out of this unhurt and alive. In rushing to accomplish a human spaceflight in the race with the US, Soviet engineers pushed the boundary of acceptable risk to its limits. Fortunately for Soviet planners everything went well.

Yuri Gagarin's flight as the first human in space fiftyfive years ago may have been slightly more dangerous than previously thought.
posted by MartinWisse (13 comments total)

A bit of a side note, but couldn't help notice this bit:

Many websites will tell you that Gagarin was not the first human in space, that there were earlier “lost cosmonauts,” and, most sensationally, that his untimely death in 1968 was part of some nefarious Communist Party plan.

So Russian conspiracy theorists are convinced that the Russians got up there earlier than announced, while American conspiracy theorists are convinced that the Americans never got up there? I suspect this is saying something about something, not quite sure what, though.
posted by effbot at 2:51 AM on April 15, 2016 [17 favorites]

Definitely a 50th anniversary to celebrate in human accomplishment!

(Though don't forget to set aside a moment next year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of our planet's first space travelers.)
posted by fairmettle at 3:35 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

The article is great but the choice for the pull quote is a weird one since it implies that the engineering was to blame. While that section does set up for that possibility, the conclusion of the article says:

"The many problems that Gagarin faced on his mission were not necessarily due to poor design or bad engineering, I would argue, but instead a combination of haste and poor workmanship on the factory floor. Consider that the Vostok spacecraft consisted of 241 vacuum tubes, more than 6,000 transistors, 56 electric motors, and about 800 relays and switches connected by about 15 kilometers of cable. In addition, there were 880 plug connectors, each (on average) having 850 contact points. A total of 123 organizations, including 36 factories, contributed parts to the entire Vostok system. Despite redundancy in a large number of systems, human-rating such a spacecraft with absolute confidence was practically impossible. Yet, the way that Soviet engineers designed the system, it was meant to operate even at the blurry edges where parameters were pushed to the max. It is because of this that I would argue that the Vostok design was in fact excellent engineering if we define “excellent engineering” as also being incredibly robust. "

posted by I-baLL at 4:03 AM on April 15, 2016 [5 favorites]

Considering the Soviet Union's habit of only announcing successful missions after they were completed, there's still a chance Gagarin wasn't their first man sent into space, just the first to make it back alive. The documentation of any failed missions has no doubt been well shredded, but the history detectives who found this info are certainly not finished.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:13 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure anyone thought it was anything other than dangerous as hell. The prior test launches (including a few manned by dogs) were a real mixed bag of success and catastrophic failure.

.................
Considering the Soviet Union's habit of only announcing successful missions after they were completed, there's still a chance Gagarin wasn't their first man sent into space, just the first to make it back alive.

The early Soviet space program is an entertaining rabbit hole to go down into. Google "Torre Bert" or the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, for some really nifty conspiracy/hidden truth reading. This site is a good place to start.
It's been around a long time. The RealAudio file have only recently been converted to mp3.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 AM on April 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

A total of 123 organizations, including 36 factories, contributed parts to the entire Vostok system.

That's on top of the huge industrial and military machinery involved in launching and operating a flight.

I think that any notion that a failed flight could be completely covered up, given the enormous amount of bureaucratic paper trail associated with running a project of this complexity, posits an efficiency entirely at odds with the state's documented abilities. You'd have to delete the entire history of the construction and testing of the flight and all its components, without leaving any trace of the effort to do so. It's not just a matter of shredding documents; you'd have to fake the records of production lines to excise the missing material, there'd be gaps in serial numbers and engineering change logs that you couldn't easily cover up, and there'd be no way to analyse and update anything as a result of the failure.

And all this would have to be executed perfectly during a period when they didn't have the time or manpower to test flight systems properly, and when everybody would be feverishly trying to work out what had gone wrong and making practical and policy decisions up and down the line.

It's possible, but utterly implausible.
posted by Devonian at 5:26 AM on April 15, 2016 [7 favorites]

That site isn't loading for me, Thorzdad. I was about to point to previous posts on the blue, but most of those sites are dead, too. Here's the Wikipedia page on the "lost cosmonauts" rumors.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:29 AM on April 15, 2016

..and after I posted the above, it loaded. Well.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:30 AM on April 15, 2016

Yuri Gagarin's flight as the first human in space fiftyfive years ago may have been slightly more dangerous than previously thought.

Yeah, don't know about that, considering a lot of the problems mentioned in the article can be found in the Wikipedia pages about the various flights of the Vostok spacecraft. It had a history of the service module failing to immediately separate on reentry.

The real problem with the early Soviet space program was that it was being run like a capitalist enterprise with multiple divisions with separate goals competing against each other. Plus the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had a penchant for ordering flights on specific dates, which is just insane in spaceflight even today, let alone at the very beginning. So risk was built in from the top down. It's a testament to chief engineer Sergei Korolev skills, both mechanical and political, that the program was able to pull off most flights.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:22 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Considering the Soviet Union's habit of only announcing successful missions after they were completed, there's still a chance Gagarin wasn't their first man sent into space, just the first to make it back alive.

I really wish people would stop spreading rumors and innuendo about lost cosmonauts as absolutely nothing has come out of that nonsense.

Those early cosmonauts were deeply committed and caring people, with tight bonds. Korolev cared deeply about them and did the best he could to make things safe as possible. Based on the little bit of reading that I've done about the Soviet space program, it's doubtful they would have keep silent all these years about any lost cosmonauts.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:23 AM on April 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

It amazes me that more people weren't killed in the early days of the space race. Read about Leonov's first space walk, when he had to partially deflate his suit in order to get back into the capsule, or the fact that the Soviet lunar lander was a one seater. Imagine landing on a planet (I know, not really a planet) and being the only one there. At least Armstrong and Aldrin each had a buddy.

These dudes are fucking heroes all the way.
posted by bondcliff at 6:39 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

It amazes me that more people weren't killed in the early days of the space race.

Neither side wanted to get anyone killed, as bringing people alive signaled a major triumph.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:48 AM on April 15, 2016

Lost cosmonauts: previously, previously.

Actual Soviet Space Bureau losses.

As ever, Comrade BB is right on all matters space related and represents the voice of the people in this matter.
posted by mwhybark at 9:37 AM on April 15, 2016 [2 favorites]