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Sergei Vladimir IIyushin is a hero to Paul Tsarinsky. He believes that Sergei Vladimir IIyushin was the first man in space, but there are others that do not agree with his opinion. FEEDBACK |
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is false:
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Some feel the story
is or might be true:
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Mark Wade has a great web site dedicated to SPACEFLIGHT. We asked
his permission to include images of Gagarin and Vostok 1 on this web page
and he responded, MY HERO received another comment from MARK WADE creator of a great web site on space history called, SPACEFLIGHT. Mark Wade is adament that the story on Ilyushin is a fraud.
This is really not a matter of controversy - this is an
error of fact. You might as well allow people to submit pages of Hitler
as their hero, maintaining that all those nasty stories of him killing
millions of people were just slanders made up by his jealous enemies.
The entire early history of the Soviet manned space program has been
declassified and we have piles of memoirs of cosmonauts, engineers,
etc who participated. We know who was in the original cosmonaut team,
who never flew, was dismissed, or was killed in ground tests. Ilyushin
is not one of them.
"By April 9th, every foreign newsman in Moscow was sitting
by his radio set. On the next day, Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent
of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, scooped the world with
his report that a man had been shot into space but had returned deranged
and was now hidden away in a rest home. The pilot was indirectly identified
as Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Sergeyevich Ilyushin, son of the aircraft
designer and a famous test pilot in his own right. The cosmonaut, launched
on April 7th or 8th, had circled the earth three times in his spaceship
"Rossiya" ("Russia").
"Ogden was aware of the rumors and stories about an imminent manned
space flight. There had been indications that it had almost been launched
several times. Or perhaps it had really been launched, and the official
silence implied that it had failed.
"Furthermore, he learned from other personal contacts that Lieutenant
Colonel Ilyushin, who was a neighbor of Ogden's in Moscow, had been
injured somehow and was in a hospital.
"Ogden concluded that the flight had already taken place and that
Ilyushin was the pilot. With extra details from the U.S. Mercury program,
he wrote his story and sent it out to London. The correspondent was
wrong on so many particulars that he probably never even got to any
real news leak. There was enough evidence flowing around Moscow to put
his story together with.
The best argument against the report of this and earlier failures
is the fact that when Gagarin was eventually launched, TASS released
its first bulletin while he was still in flight.... If the flight had
been preceded by unannounced failures, it is obvious that it would not
have been announced until a successful completion had been achieved".
Laura Whitlock from NASA's Star Child Project wrote:
I am not a space historian, however I have researched this
subject some since receiving several questions on the subject of killed
cosmonauts of various names and who was first in orbit. I include below
what I have read in books that I would trust more than a newspaper report,
a Time magazine article, or a 1964 (cold war) version of anything.
I cannot stop you from linking to our site, however I cannot condone
what this story says. I believe it perpetuates a myth. I also cannot
grant permission to use our two images, since I do not own them and
had to obtain permission to use them myself.
Regards,
Ms. Whitlock continued:
QUESTION: RESPONSE: The first cosmonaut fatality was of Valentin Bondarenko on 23 March
1961. However, it was during a high altitude chamber test flight not
a spaceflight. Garbled rumors of a cosmonaut death reached the West
and soon became an industry for the Western media. An amateur radio
station in Italy claimed to use its radio apparatus to pick up signals
from stranded, dying cosmonauts and in 3 years wiped out an entire squad
of cosmonauts. In fact, it is believed that Bondarenko's death was the
only accident concealed from the public.
Selection of the group to be trained for manned space flight (and dubbed
"cosmonauts") took place from October 1959 to January 1960 (so no one
could have died BEFORE then!). Twenty Soviet Air Force pilots were selected.
Of these, only 12 ever made it into space. Some were dismissed for a
drunken brawl in late 1961. One left voluntarily. Two suffered from
debilitating injuries. One failed a medical review and was drummed out.
The 6 men selected for intense training to be "first" in space were
Kartashov, Varlamov, Gagarin, Titov, Nikolayev, and Popovich. Kartashov
and Varlamov were injured and replaced by Nelyubov and Bykovsky.
In May 1960, Spaceship 1 was put into orbit carrying a dummy cosmonaut.
It was the first flight of a capsule large enough to carry such a payload
and the dummy (dubbed Ivan Ivanovich) flew on several subsequent flights
along with canine companions. Dogs were first successfully put into
orbit in August 1960 as the first "biological payload" in the capsule
designed to carry mankind. The last preparatory flight was on 25 March
1961, carrying Ivan Ivanovich and a dog named Zvezdochka. All went well
and the time had come for true human spaceflight. So, Gagarin made his
flight in April.
It should be noted as well that many lost their lives in a terrible
explosion at the Baikonour cosmodrome in late October 1960. Many of
the deaths of top-level people in the space prgram were publically attributed
to "aircraft accidents". This accident postponed the scheduled date
of the first manned flight from December 1960 until the following Spring.
Good Resources:
The New Russian Space Programme: From Competition to Collaboration, The First Manned Spaceflight: Russia's Quest for Space, Handbook of Soviet Manned Space Flight,
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The MY HERO staff asked Paul Tsarinsky to identify the source for his information on Ilyushin. His source, Dr. Elliott H. Haimoff, Senior Producer of Global Science Productions responded in detail, here is his e mail to MY HERO
Dear Sir/Madam: We have spent five years working on this story, collecting evidence,
interviewing Western reporters who were in Russia at the time and originally
covered this story, tracking down Russian individuals who were involved
in this event, and we have gone to Russia and interviewed Ilyushin himself.
Ilyushin is still alive and well and living in Moscow, but he was very
difficult to locate and get a hold of. he turned out to be a very unassuming,
quiet, shy man, who lives a quiet life as a retired general but still
dabbles in fighter jet designs. The story IS TRUE, and Ilyushin told
us his story even though he's still scared to death to tell it on camera,
but let us film him anyways. We had even interviewed a western journalist
who recently had access to the Kremlin archives and saw internal memos
and documents (never intended to be seen by Westerners at the time they
were written in 1961) confirming the fact that Ilyushin went up into
space first.
I am just disgusted with all of your doubters and "James Oberg"-type
clones who have just been duped for the last 40 years, and are just
expressing their 'sour grapes' over not being able to root out this
story first, or hold up books and articles of 40 years of Russian propaganda
and tell the world that this is the truth beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Most people don't seem to understand that the whole nature of the Soviet
empire was to be top secret, so it was relatively easy to cover-up such
an event. In addition, our documentary also covered all of the circumstancial
evidence that backed up Ilyushin's story, that looking at them in the
cold light of hindsight, makes this story absolutely believable and
credible, which doubters and so-called Russian space experts failed
to piece together.
I would be most happy to send you or anyone else a copy of our TV
documentary program to put to rest the issue of who went into space
first, or we would be eager to argue this issue with anyone who may
claim to know about this subject more than this production company (there
obviously is no one who can even hope to claim to be anywhere near as
versed in this whole matter as we are). Any person who just pooh-poohs
this as a myth or a fraud, is in reality a fraud themselves who can
only be considered a puppet to Russian propaganda. I am fully aware
that we are having to break the image of almost 40 years of history,
and every history book encyclopedia, etc. will ultimately have to be
changed. However, we are confident that it will be noted in the history
books that the other so-called Russian space experts will be remembered
as having perpetuated the myth and fraud of Gagarin themselves, and
Paul Tsarinsky will be remembered as being one of the first to turn
on the lights to the truth.
We encourage the light of scrutiny and investigation into this matter
and the opportunity to bring out our findings out into the open, and
we will let the history books of the future decide who scurries for
cover like roaches and holds up 40 year old Russian propaganda as their
way of thinking that they know the truth about this issue and not being
called an ignorant idiot.
I very much look forward to any input you or your colleagues or so-called
Russian space experts may wish to offer.
Another web site My Hero discovered with photos of Yuri Gagarin was created by Anders Thorsell. I e-mailed him and his reply was this... Itīs an interesting theory that Gagarin was not the first man in space. it seems logical as well cause the Soviets really wanted to make this event a major success. There are also rumours that Gagarin was killed by the authorities, cause he started to doubt the Soviet system. The Soviet authorities may have taken the chance to illuminate him and to make Gagarin an even greater hero. Killed in a plane crash. |
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