
Declassified documents offer a new perspective on Yuri Gagarin’s flight - ColinWright
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2844/1
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sandworm101
This doesn't seem all that different than the Mercury program. There were two
side to the race. Look closely at either and you will find safety being
pushed.

It is also a little disingenuous to characterize the russian effort as
"military" and the american effort as not. It wasn't Mr. John Glen first
american in orbit. He remained an military officer while at Nasa and was
awarded military honors for his flight (DFC). Smack whatever label you want,
both programs had heavy military involvement.

~~~
avmich
Mercury is an incredible spacecraft. Incredibly small and light - less than
1400 kilogram, comparing to more than 4000 kilogram of Vostok. As an astronaut
(Grissom?) put it, "you don't enter Mercury - you carefully put the spacecraft
on you like gloves".

~~~
sandworm101
I sat in a mock-up once. Glove was not my impression. For me it was more 'spam
in a can'. I would much prefer Vostok's ejection seat to landing a tiny
mercury in a vast ocean.

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sandworm101
I don't like double posting, but I read this again and ran accross this
statement towards the end of the OP:

>But the frantic pace of the “space race” ensured that you had to sacrifice
thorough ground testing in favor of debugging the technology in space. This
means that you automatically increase the risk to human subjects on board
spaceships.

By my memory, the US lost most astros to ground testing than to flight, the
Apollo fire being top of the list. Training and testing are safer than flight,
but are not absolutely safe. There is a balance point where the risks
presented by ever more training outweigh any further reduction in risk during
flight.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Prior to the Space Shuttle, all deaths related to our space programs happened
as part of training: the Apollo 1 cabin fire during a pad test, and Gemini 9
crew's plane crash resulted in five total astronaut deaths.

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avmich
A common idea was "any single system fault shouldn't make catastrophe by
itself". Nowadays it's "any single fault shouldn't jeopardize the mission and
any two faults should still allow for safe return of the crew". The
redundancies are designed in accordance to this.

From this perspective Gagarin would die if both accelerating stage worked
longer and retrorockets failed. Only one of this two systems malfunctioned -
so, barely, he managed to return unscathed.

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rdtsc
Just like a software project, it will just not be perfect on first release. If
they had waited to fix the comms module, to test the strap on the survival
pack, and so on, they'd still be working on it today and other country
(probably US) would have beat them into space.

Overal their program probably killed about the same number of cosmonauts as US
killed astronauts, or maybe even less.

You can play some games with numbers maybe if you want to include unmanned
rockets exploding on launchpads or not -- China killed maybe around 500 people
with an a satelite launch in the 90's. Russians killed 50 launchpad personnel
during a failed Vostok lunch in the 60's.

~~~
kushti
Where did you get those numbers?

~~~
mmorris
Not the gp, but here is additional info:

\- China: Intelsat 708
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708)

\- Russia: 1980 (not 1960s) Vostok Accident:
[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/28/world/1980-soviet-
rocket-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/28/world/1980-soviet-rocket-
accident-killed-50.html)

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smcl
It's incredible that even though this was an incredibly advanced piece of
engineering, something so simple as a shortwave radio malfunctioned.

------
veidr
TL;DR — "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. "

Interesting.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I remember reading Gagarin's biography few years ago. It mentioned that
testing the limits of human endurance was a part of kosmonaut's training - and
that was meant literally, i.e. any mistake or problem could and did result in
serious injury or death.

~~~
sandworm101
I'm not sure about that. There have been plenty of mistakes made by
astro/cosmonaughts over the years. They are human. If "any mistake" is lethal,
then we should have seen many more deaths.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wrote about cosmonaut's training, not a trained cosmonaut's job. Those who
got hurt or died in training didn't get to fly rockets. Also, that was in the
Gagarin's time; after getting enough data they probably relaxed the training a
bit in the next decades.

