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  Vostok 1: Declassified docs provide new details

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Author Topic:   Vostok 1: Declassified docs provide new details
Robert Pearlman
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From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 10-13-2015 08:16 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Historian Asif Siddiqi, who authored "Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974," recently gained access to declassified documents that reveal numerous anomalies with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's spacecraft, while also underscoring that the Vostok was embedded in the Soviet military environment. Siddiqi summarizes his findings for The Space Review.
The document underscores what has often been overlooked by casual historians—that the flight of Gagarin's Vostok was fundamentally embedded in a military environment. His spaceship was actually an offshoot variant of a new spy satellite ("Zenit"), not, as many often claim, that the spy satellite was the offshoot of the human variant. Engineers basically took out the cameras from the spy satellite, added life support, an ejection seat, and redundancies, and rigged the spacecraft for a human being.

Besides the document's comment about a "program of observation," we get an explicit confirmation of the military importance of Gagarin's flight in the next sentence, when the authors note that the flight has "opened up new prospects in the mastery of cosmic space and the use of these objects for the interests of defense."

Despite the obvious note of self-congratulation about the flight ("all systems ensuring the insertion into orbit, flight in orbit, and return of the return module and the cosmonaut [back] to Earth, worked normally") the document notes there were numerous "basic shortcomings" during the preparation and implementation of the mission. Going through these we get a rare and peculiar glimpse into the Cold War Soviet space program and its functioning in a climate of high stakes and incredibly high risk.

We find from the document that during the preparation of two precursor missions with dogs in March 1961, and then in manufacturing Gagarin's actual vehicle, at least 70 anomalies were detected in instruments on the vehicle. Yet, still, the flight went ahead!

...what does this all mean? 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. Sure, some of this was due to luck. Things that could have gone wrong didn't. But some of it was also the undeniably robust design of the Vostok spaceship itself.[/i]

Lasv3
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From: Bratislava, Slovakia
Registered: Apr 2009

posted 10-13-2015 11:58 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Lasv3   Click Here to Email Lasv3     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
In the last year released Russian made movie "Gagarin" all the mentioned flight anomalies are covered — higher than planned orbit, poor communication, wild rotation during re-entry and late modules separation, reserve chute opening and trouble with the opening of the spacesuit respiration valve, etc.

On top of that there is a scene where Korolyov comments the possibility of the remote destruction of the spaceship shall it land in an "enemy" territory. What he says, not seriously, is like "I'd prefer to destroy the ship in case like that just to avoid the others to see what junk are we flying to space."

All this said it seems that the filmmakers were well informed as well.

Lasv3
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Posts: 410
From: Bratislava, Slovakia
Registered: Apr 2009

posted 10-14-2015 05:23 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Lasv3   Click Here to Email Lasv3     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
A few more comments to the above topic.

Vostok design coming out of the Zenith class satellites can be no surprise really. Korolyov in those times was heavily pushed to work on the military projects and his non-military projects have to be smuggled into the plan. There was no big support neither from the military nor from the politburo (it came only later), not speaking of the rather poor financial resources of the Soviet Union which were preferably invested in the military projects.

To balance between military and non-military projects he had to use rather universal designs to save money and keep the interest of the top brass intact to get more finance.

This makes the use of the Zenith design for the Vostok spaceship a logical step and it does not matter which one was first. He would have used it vice versa as well if it came to it.

And the number of development flaws before the first flight? There are always some, mainly in the untried field like manned spaceflight that time. Whether they were all removed before the Gagarin's flight or not, Korolyov was the kind of man who took risks to achieve a lot. And had Korolyov not died prematurely it is very well possible that the Apollo 8 crew would not be the first humans around the Moon. Korolyov would most probably risk the circumlunar mission even with the shortcomings present that time.

Of course, with the risk approach like this you need a very good portion of luck, and the Soviets in Korolyov times had both — courage to risk and luck to get away with it unharmed gaining their space firsts.

All times are CT (US)

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