Lost in Space
What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.
By Kris Hollington
July 2008
By Alex Tomlinson.
www.alex-tomlinson.com
FT233
Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed.
The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of flats. Grabbing their assorted pipes, along with a large toolbox, the two brothers ran up the stairs to the rooftop. Moments later, the city’s silence was rudely broken once more as they set to work: a concerto of hammering, clattering, sawing and shouting.
Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!”
One of the young men shouted back “Sorry sir; the Soviets have launched a satellite and we’re trying to intercept it!”
The brothers finished setting up, grabbed their head-sets, twiddled the knobs on their portable receivers, hit the record button and listened…
“Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous?”
The brothers looked nervously at one another. They only fully understood the Russian later when their sister translated for them, but the desperation in the woman’s voice was clear.
“Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!”
The signal went dead.
FROM OUTER SPACE
There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.
The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effect ively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.
The brothers’ passion for radio began in 1949, when Achille Judica-Cordiglia was 16 and Gian was just 10. For them, radio was the Internet of its day, a wonderful invention which fuelled their dreams of explor*ation; they adored cinema too, and filmed everything they did.
More than 50 years ago, on 4 October 1957, an event took place that transformed their lives forever. The brothers were sitting at a table in the large attic bedroom where they should have been doing their homework but, as usual, were tinkering with old radio parts. Suddenly, the programme they were listening to was interrupted – the Soviets had just launched Sputnik I (left), the first satellite to orbit the Earth.
“They gave the frequency it was transmitting its beeps on,” recalled Achille, “so we thought: shall we try?”
They didn’t know it, but Turin was perfectly situated to track the Soviet satellites; northern Italy was the only area in Western Europe on Russia’s orbital path.
The brothers had their recording within a few minutes. Elated, they decided that they would track and record anything that went up into space. The brothers ended up constructing an 8m (26ft) collaps ible dish which they sneakily perched on the rooftop of the highest block of flats in Turin’s city centre. To try and keep it secret they built it in such a way that it could be erected and dismantled extremely quickly.
After the success of Sputnik, Russian Prem ier Nikita Khrushchev boasted: “The US doesn’t have an intercontinental missile; otherwise, it would have easily launched a satellite of its own.” Russia had demonstrated that it had the power to fire its nuclear weapons to anywhere in the US. Space was about to become the major battleground of the Cold War, and the Judica-Cordiglia brothers dreamed of being part of it.
The brothers went on to record the first living creat ure in space the following month, when Laika the dog travelled aboard Sputnik 2, and then, in February 1958, the beeps from Explorer 1, America’s first satellite. Younger sister Maria Teresa recalled “being in their room was like being in the workshop of Dædalus, it was brimming with ideas… it was one big adventure.”
Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.
“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.
The story was picked up by a Swiss-Italian radio station, and the brothers became the station’s space experts. By now, the Judica-Cordiglias were more than ready to capture the first human sounds from space. They came sooner than expected.
At 10.55pm on 2 February 1961, the brothers were scanning Russian frequencies as usual when Achille picked up a transmission from an orbiting capsule. They recorded the wheezing, struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut. The brothers contacted Professor Achille Dogliotti, Italy’s leading cardiologist and recorded his judgement. “I could quite clearly distinguish the clear sounds of forced, panting human breath,” said Dogliotti.
Two days later, the Soviet press agency announced that Russia had sent a seven-and-a-half-tonne spaceship the size of a single-decker bus into space on 2 February, which had burned up during re-entry. No further information was forthcoming.
Had the brothers captured the dying breaths of a cosmonaut?
AIRBRUSHED FROM HISTORY
James Oberg worked in NASA’s mission control for almost 20 years before becoming a space historian specialising in the Russian space programme. According to him, “the sounds the Judica-Cordiglias heard could be interpreted to mean a lost cosmonaut; in those days nobody could tell. In those days so much was secret and much of the Soviet space programme was wrapped in disinformation, and bred by ignorance.”
Large parts of the early Soviet Space programme remain unknown to this day; information was destroyed; most of those involved have died or vanished. Some historians have recently solved some of the mysteries surrounding the early cosmonauts. Oberg himself discovered that a famous photo of the ‘Sochi Six’, a group of Russia’s original top cosmonaut candidates, had been doctored, erasing one of the six men.
Oberg discovered that the rosebush was Grigoriy Nelyubov, expelled from the programme in 1961 after a drunken brawl with some soldiers. Some time later, drunk and depressed, Nelyubov stepped in front of a train and was killed. Other airbrushings include Anatoliy Kartashov, who experienced skin bleeding during a centrifuge run, and Valentin Varlamov who vanished after injuring his neck in a diving accident. Vladimir Shatalov, the Commander of Cosmonaut Training from 1971 to 1987, admitted that “six or eight” trainees had died in the 1960s, but wouldn’t say how. The Russian cosmonaut, it seems, had to be perfect or not exist at all. By 1971, nine cosmonauts had vanished from the official photographs which were re-released in honour of the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight.
So, did any cosmonauts actually die in space? Russian journalist and 1965 cosmonaut candidate Yaroslav Golovanov claimed that on 10 November 1960, a cosmonaut called Byelokonyev died on board a spaceship in orbit. Mikhail Rudenko, a retired senior space engineer, claimed a few years ago that three early victims were test pilots who were simply blasted straight up into space between 1957 and 1959.
Sadly, there is no evidence to back these claims. But the Soviets were experts at making people and evid ence disapp ear, so it is all too easy to believe that more deaths might have occ urred in those desperate early days of the space race. Risks were taken at the insistence of Khrushchev, who needed results for political leverage. Tests were not completed and safety checks were ignored. On 23 October 1960, a rocket exploded at Baikonur vaporising 165 technicians, an event that was hushed up by the Soviet authorities for over 30 years.
One fatality that we do know about from those early days was that of Valentin Bondarenko. At 24, he was the youngest cosmonaut. He met his terrible end on 23 March 1961, while in a pressure chamber as part of a 10-day isolation exercise. Bondarenko dropped an alcohol-soaked cotton swab on a hot plate, which – in the oxygen-rich environment – started a fire that ignited his suit. It was 20 minutes before the pressurised door could be opened. Bondarenko was pulled out barely alive, crying “It was my fault”, and died eight hours later, comforted by his best friend, Yuri Gagarin. News of the accident was hushed up until 1986.
Two weeks after Bondarenko’s death, on 11 April 1961, an Italian journalist working for the International Press Agency in Moscow received a tip-off that something “of immense importance” was about to happen. He called the Cordiglia brothers.
“We leapt out of bed,” said Achille, “dashed over to our receivers and began listening. Suddenly, in what was a magical moment, the hiss faded and this Russian voice emerged from very far away for a few seconds.” At that stage, no one in the West – not even the President of the United States – knew that the Russians had launched a rocket.
Russian translators were few and far between but the brothers had this covered – their younger sister was fluent in Russian. The first sentence they heard was: “The flight is proceeding normally. I feel well. The flight is normal. I am withstanding well the state of weightlessness.”
As the brothers listened, the cosmonaut experimented with zero gravity. They lost the signal as the cosmonaut prepared for re-entry while whistling a communist hymn. It was only then that President John F Kennedy was awoken at 2am to be given the news that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space.
Five weeks later, on 19 May 1961, the brothers picked up what is now their most infamous recording, which they claim is of a woman cosmonaut whose ship burned up on re-entry. Then, a few days after this, they picked up a tantalising few seconds of another trans mission: “Conditions growing worse, why don’t you answer?” Both recordings are clear and accurately translated.
TORRE BERT
The brothers got permission to take over a disused German bunker on the outskirts of Turin at a place called Torre Bert. Reclaiming all the scrap metal and old pipes they could find, they enlisted the help of a dozen student volunteers and constructed a series of antennæ, eventually creating a super-dish with a diameter of 15m (50ft) and weighing one and a half tonnes.
The brothers stuck a sign on the bunker wall: Torre Bert Space Centre. Inside, using discarded WWII American army equipment, they created an exact replica of Cape Canaveral, including an enormous map of the world behind a Perspex sheet along with an LED display that marked satellites’ progress. Kitchen clocks provided the time in London, Moscow, Cape Kennedy and Turin. Volunteers wore white coats. While the US spent 15 million dollars on one listening post, Torre Bert had cost the brothers nothing; and, as they soon discovered, it worked just as well.
With the opening of Torre Bert, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers became local superstars. “Those days were frenetic and exciting,” recalled Gian’s wife Laura, “because when word got out that there was a space mission it was packed with girlfriends, friends, students; even professors started coming.”
The brothers found partners to create their own amateur space-tracking network, dubbed ‘Zeus’. When they got word of an imminent launch, they notified 16 stations across the world. Gian’s fiancée coordinated the operation.
The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.
“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.
They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.
