Reuben's trip to Russia

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of human space flight, Russia sent a fresh crew to the International Space Station. The Soyuz FG rocket carrying the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft with a crew of three lifted off from Site 1 in Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 5, 2011, at 02:18:20 Moscow Summer Time. The vehicle departed from the same facility, which hosted the historic launch of Yuri Gagarin and the blastoff of the world's first artificial satellite. After a nine-minute powered flight, Soyuz TMA-21 entered orbit safely, mission control reported.



The Russian space agency, Roskosmos, officially dedicated the Soyuz TMA-21 launch to the pioneering mission of the Vostok spacecraft on April 12, 1961.



The docking of the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft with the MIM-2 Poisk module of the International Space Station is scheduled for April 7, 2011, at 03:18:00 Moscow Time. The spacecraft and its crew is expected to remain at the outpost until September 2011.



Onboard the station, the crew of Soyuz TMA-21 will join three other members of Expedition 27, who arrived onboard the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft in December 2010.

Laika (literal meaning "Barker"; c. 1954 – November 3, 1957) was a Soviet space dog that became the first ever animal to orbit the Earth and the first orbital death. The technology to deorbit had not yet been developed, so there was no expectation for survival. Little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living things at the time Laika's mission was launched. Some scientists believed humans would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so engineers viewed flights by non-human animals as a necessary precursor to human missions. Laika, a stray, originally named Kudryavka (Russian: Кудрявка Little Curly), underwent training with two other dogs, and was eventually chosen as the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on November 3, 1957.

Laika likely died within hours after launch from overheating,possibly caused by a failure of the central R-7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death was not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out, or (as the Soviets initially insisted) she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion. Nonetheless, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness, paving the way for human spaceflight and providing scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.

On April 11, 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to Laika. A small monument in her honor was built near the military research facility in Moscow which prepared Laika's flight to space. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket.

From Soviet space dogs to American squirrel monkeys, the history of animals in space is long and illustrious. Many a milestone was reached during the Space Race between the 20th century superpowers, yet one of the little known animal astronauts to feature in this Cold War competition was actually a swine of Soviet extraction. This little piggy (let’s call him Pinkie) drinking what could be his last drinky isn’t asking for the moon, but by Stalin he’s being sent there. Let’s snuffle out the story.



Down the snout goes the wine – a nice drop of Kagor to sweeten the taste of being blasted into space. Let’s hope it relaxes the poor piglet; he’s got a long journey ahead of him, poor porker. But wait up a second. Why are the history books conspicuously silent about this cosmonaut creature? Are we being sold some kind of pig in a poke here?



As Pinkie is piled into his capsule and carried over to the launch pad, we wonder whether those men’s uniforms aren’t a little too WWII-looking – bearing in mind that the Soviets aren’t supposed to have shot their first mammal into space until 1951. Swine flew? Pigs might fly. These are stills from the award-winning 2005 Russian mockumentary, First on the Moon.



Directed by debutant filmmaker Aleksey Fedorchenko, First on the Moon tells the tale of an unknown Soviet space program that launched a successful moon landing in 1938. In Fedorchenko’s world, the first space rocket was built by the USSR even before the Second World War, decades before the Soviet Moonshot written in history. Mother Russia, we salute you!



In this alternate reality, a Soviet cosmonaut beats his US counterparts to the finishing post – the rest of the world just doesn’t know about it yet. And just as in our more familiar reality, scientific experiments using animals paved the way for human exploration endeavour by testing the survivability of spaceflight. Seems this pilot piglet was part of the rocket trials.

When parts of First on the Moon’s plot leaked out before its release, several Russian newspapers treated it as a documentary about a real 1938 event, referring to it as the Santiago Meteorite. The confusion may have arisen because the beginning of the film is set in Chile, where the manned Soviet spacecraft apparently landed following its return from the moon.


Is it surprising that the distinction between fact and fantasy should have appeared as muddy as a pigsty to the Russian press? Depends on how you look at it. In the British and American film traditions, reality and fiction have long been tough to tell apart: films and dramas often employ documentary conventions; documentaries can contain dramatic and fictional elements.


In the West, satire is famous for spoofing the documentary, but in Russia – certainly unacquainted with Spinal Tap if not with Borat and Brüno – the mockumentary has only just landed or emerged as a genre. Fedorchenko himself was unsure of where to place his film: “For me this is either historical drama or documentary fantasy,” the director has said.

Playful filmmaking like Fedorchenko’s was lost in Cold War Russia, but the director of First on the Moon also has a serious point to make: “Our film is about how the Soviet state machinery manufactured major products – the best people. Fine, strong and clever heroes, then rendered unnecessary to the native land – some have been destroyed, others lost in obscurity, yet others still broken by fear.”

This most piggish of guinea pigs would be one of those heroes. Pigs in Space? Watch First on the Moon. If these stills were enough to fool people online, what elevating effect might the movie have on you?

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin ; 9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968), was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. After being selected for Air Force Group 1, he became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft launched successfully and completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. After re-entry, Gagarin ejected from the craft and landed safely by parachute.

After the mission, Gagarin became an international celebrity, and was awarded many medals and honours, including Hero of the Soviet Union. Vostok 1 marked his only spaceflight, but he served as backup to the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal crash. Gagarin later became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow which was later named after him.

Gagarin died when his training jet crashed in 1968. The precise cause of the crash is uncertain, but investigators have proposed various explanations.

On 12 April 1961, Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, launching to orbit aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1). His call sign was Siberian Pine Russian: Кедр).[11]
In his post-flight report, Gagarin recalled his experience of spaceflight, having been the first human in space: The feeling of weightlessness was somewhat unfamiliar compared with Earth conditions. Here, you feel as if you were hanging in a horizontal position in straps. You feel as if you are suspended.

Following the flight, Gagarin told the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that during reentry he had whistled the tune "The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows" (Russian: "Родина слышит, Родина знает").[13][14] The first two lines of the song are: "The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky".[15] This patriotic song was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951 (opus 86), with words by Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky.

After the flight, some sources claimed that Gagarin, during his space flight, had made the comment, "I don't see any God up here." However, no such words appear in the verbatim record of Gagarin's conversations with the Earth during the spaceflight.[16] In a 2006 interview a close friend of Gagarin, Colonel Valentin Petrov, stated that Gagarin never said such words, and that the phrase originated from Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, where the anti-religious propaganda was discussed. In a certain context Khrushchev said, "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there".[17] Colonel Petrov also said that Gagarin had been baptised into the Orthodox Church as a child.

Rise to fame
After the flight, Gagarin became a worldwide celebrity, touring widely abroad. He visited Italy, Germany, Canada, Japan to promote the Soviet coup of being the first country to put a human in space. He also visited the United Kingdom three months after the Vostok 1 success, during which he visited the cities of London and Manchester, the latter of which has been fondly remembered.

Life after Vostok 1
In 1962, he began serving as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He later returned to Star City, the cosmonaut facility, where he spent seven years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft. He became Lieutenant Colonel (or Podpolkovnik) of the Soviet Air Force on 12 June 1962 and on 6 November 1963 he received the rank of Colonel (Polkovnik) of the Soviet Air Force.[5] Soviet officials tried to keep him away from any flights, being worried of losing their hero in an accident. Gagarin was backup pilot for Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz 1 flight. As Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was ultimately banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

Death
Monument of Yuri Gagarin on Cosmonauts Alley in Moscow
On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, he and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died in a MiG-15UTI crash near the town of Kirzhach. The bodies of Gagarin and Seryogin were cremated and the ashes were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square.

Gagarin had become deputy training director of the Star City cosmonaut training base. At the same time, he began to re-qualify as a fighter pilot.

Cause of jet crash
It is not certain what caused the crash, but a 1986 inquest suggests that the turbulence from a Su-11 'Fishpot-C' interceptor using its afterburners may have caused Gagarin's plane to go out of control.

Russian documents declassified in March 2003 showed that the KGB had conducted their own investigation of the accident, in addition to one government and two military investigations. The KGB's report dismissed various conspiracy theories, instead indicating that the actions of air base personnel contributed to the crash. The report states that an air traffic controller provided Gagarin with outdated weather information, and that by the time of his flight, conditions had deteriorated significantly. Ground crew also left external fuel tanks attached to the aircraft. Gagarin's planned flight activities needed clear weather and no outboard tanks. The investigation concluded that Gagarin's aircraft entered a spin, either due to a bird strike or because of a sudden move to avoid another aircraft. Because of the out-of-date weather report, the crew believed their altitude to be higher than it actually was, and could not properly react to bring the MiG-15 out of its spin.

In his 2004 book Two Sides of the Moon, Alexey Leonov recounts that he was flying a helicopter in the same area that day when he heard "two loud booms in the distance." Corroborating other theories, his conclusion is that a Sukhoi jet (which he identifies as a Su-15 'Flagon') was flying below its minimum allowed altitude, and "without realizing it because of the terrible weather conditions, he passed within 10 or 20 meters of Yuri and Seregin's plane while breaking the sound barrier." The resulting turbulence would have sent the MiG into an uncontrolled spin. Leonov believes the first boom he heard was that of the jet breaking the sound barrier, and the second was Gagarin's plane crashing.

Another theory, advanced by the original crash investigator in 2005, hypothesizes that a cabin air vent was accidentally left open by the crew or the previous pilot, leading to oxygen deprivation and leaving the crew incapable of controlling the aircraft.[23] A similar theory, published in Air & Space magazine, is that the crew detected the open vent and followed procedure by executing a rapid dive to a lower altitude. This dive caused them to lose consciousness and crash.

On 12 April 2007, the Kremlin vetoed a new investigation into the death of Gagarin. Some experts who had been involved in the original investigation had formulated a new theory, based on modern technology and investigative methods. Government officials said that they saw no reason to begin a new investigation.