Russian Rulers History Podcast · Mark Schauss

The Soviet Space Program - Part Two

·24 min

The show finishes its two-part look at the Soviet Space Program by beginning with Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin is treated as the clear headline, since his flight was the first human trip into space. Before that, the Soviets had already put together a string of firsts with satellites, animals, and launch attempts. The host keeps pointing out that the world saw the victories, while many of the failures stayed hidden. Khrushchev's drive to protect the Soviet image hangs over the whole story. When the Americans looked close to launching a man into space, the Soviets pushed even harder. More than 200 men were chosen for the first test group. They went through physical trials and mental trials, then classes in space flight, astronomy, and related science. That process narrowed the field to 20, then to six, and finally to one man who clearly stood out. The episode then moves through the Vostok 1K launches and the Korobel Sputnik 4 flight, counting the failures and the successes one by one. It lingers on Korobel Sputnik 4, which carried Chernushka, the mannequin Ivan Ivanovich, about 80 mice, and some guinea pigs. That flight worked, which made the next step toward a human launch feel both more real and more dangerous. Then the story takes a hard turn with Valentin Bondarenko's death in an oxygen-rich isolation chamber fire. The show notes that the tragedy was kept quiet and did not become public until 1986. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin launches on Vostok 1 and spends one hour and 48 minutes in space. The mission becomes a major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union. The episode then moves past the early triumph and into the later history of the program. It gestures at the Mir years, the post-Soviet creation of Roscosmos in 1992, and the underfunding that followed the Soviet collapse. It also notes the rebound that came with the Russian economy in 2005. The ending lands on the later break in cooperation with NASA, which leaves the whole space program with a long, uneven afterlife.

As heard by us

Gagarin’s flight is the center of it, but the failures, pressure, and propaganda matter just as much.

This episode follows Yuri Gagarin, the rush to prepare a cosmonaut, and the way Soviet firsts were folded into propaganda. It moves through the early test launches and the selection process before reaching the flight that put the first human into orbit.

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Why you'd press play

You want the Gagarin story with the pressure, the failures, and the propaganda attached.

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